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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

Can we step back and marvel at the absurdity that one of the most powerful CPUs ever created was for a phone?

From a device class where the newly all-important perf per watt was always the north star, in a market with the largest chip volume, by a company with ample margins and mountains of cash? Does not seem all that absurd :)

yea it's *the world largest company (by market capitalisation), whose main product is their flagship mobile and whose main differentiator is the CPU (almost everything else is beaten or available in competing products like Camera, number of apps etc). The moment the CPU performance falls below Android devices, people will look at iPhones differently.. iOS is a differentiator but doesn't have the x factor to make iPhones justify the premium tag.

I suspect for the majority of buyers the differentiator is the logo, then the OS, then maybe the CPU.

The logo alone wears off after a few years.

CPU speeds have been similar to competitors until around the A10 era a few years ago. The real differentiator has always been software + hardware integration happening inside the same company. The hardware team gets the insight of the software team on what areas of performance should be looked at, and the software team can optimize for the exact specifications of a future CPU line.

i thought Apple crushed other chipset in single core and managed to stay ahead in overall.

https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-a14-vs-a13-vs-snapdrag....

You’re saying The iPhone is mostly popular because the A13/14 are faster than the competition.

The grandfather points out that iPhones up to the A10 had comparable performance as the competition, and still were popular, so having faster CPUs can’t be the major reason for that popularity.

I always assumed that they would be inferior in terms of absolute performance if you were going for performance per watt. I never imagined just how efficient the silicon could be.

But these devices aren’t ‘phones’ any more are they? That’s disingenuous.

They’re hugely powerful general purpose computing devices - many people’s primary computing device if you go outside the tech bubble. They do compute intensive tasks like photo manipulation, on-line video editing, grading, and compression, they do face detection, depth estimation, etc etc.

I don’t know why people still say ‘wow all this for a telephone’ like all it does is make analog phone calls.

Because it fits in your hand and runs on a battery and is called a phone.

iPhone

As an aside, I was wondering what things does the iPhone 12 do that can even begin to tax all this horespower?

I assume there are some games that can utilize the power.

Right - 'one of the most powerful CPUs ever created was for a phone' sounds funny, so to get your head around it think instead 'one of the most powerful CPUs ever created was for a miniaturised 4k on-line editing suite and live broadcast system' and it doesn't sound so absurd anymore does it?

its a shame we can't 'dock' em to a larger monitor to do desktop work yet. There are attempts by few players, but if Apple can do that it would be another revolution..

I was pretty excited about Linux on DeX for Samsung devices since it had a capable CPU but unfortunately they discontinued it when Android 10 was released.

The standard dex is also quite capable. You can install terminals which have all the standard utils. I was even able to run vs code.

It's an ultra portable computer that for most people less than a majority of it's time will be used as a phone.

It's not absurd at all, nor surprising that the most power efficient chip was compelled by the most portable general computing device. Plugged-in desktop computers certainly weren't going to bring us here.

This just sounds like "DAE think phone=bad XD" anti-intellectualism.

I think people are misconstruing what I am saying here. I said marvel at it. It's crazy that a handheld battery powered device has one of the greatest processors in the history of human existence in it.

If you were used to using mainframes, you could have said much the same thing about desktop CPUs in the 90s. "That tiny thing doesn't even fill up a room!"

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