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Comment by akmittal | Hacker News Reader

>at the same performance levels as the A710, the A715 consumes 20% less power.

I see this in every Qualcomm release. Why don't phone makers optimize for power efficiency?

>Why don't phone makers optimize for power efficiency?

They do. I don't know what misunderstandings could lead you to believe that phone makers don't already spend significant effort and resources on power efficiency.

what OP is saying is "Why don't new phones last 20% more than last year's phones"

The CPU isn't the only user of power. The CPU may be 20% more efficient, but the screen and radio probably aren't.

And memory is also a large user of power budget. This is exactly right… larger and brighter screens, better wifi, BT, and cellular systems, more memory, and higher system speeds (because you know that 20% more efficient processor is X% faster offsetting that efficiency) all eat up that power budget.

That's because, if the chip uses 20% less power, if the latest Soc performs the same as last year but consumes 1w less power no one will buy it. So Qualcomm has to increase its power limits to show graphs like 50% FASTER WITH SIMILAR POWER CONSUMPTION

Personal anecdote:

the lower end chips like SD695 and SD732 have amazing battery lives. I personally use a SD732G smartphone with a 6000MAH battery and it gives me amazing 3-4 days of battery on one full charge

Phone makers spend a lot of time worrying about power. But because your screen and cell radio take up a minimum amount of power there's a level of diminishing returns in optimizing the application cores beyond a certain point.

And, besides that, when chips get smaller, even at the same power levels, you may end up with a smaller PCB and leave more space for a bigger battery.

It's a cycle. You get cool chips, then hot chips, then cool chips. For example, the Snapdragon 800 was a hot chip, then 801, 805 chips ran cool then the 810 had terrible heat problems. We're in a "hot" cycle right now with 888 and 8 Gen 1 phones typically having significant throttling problems.

Following that logic, the last cool flagship-grade Snapdragon would be the 870?

The 870 is a derivative of the 865, but yes, 870 phones tend to have fewer throttling issues than 888 phones.

They do, but their efforts are likely thwarted by the continuous bloating of software.

Because while the CPU gets more efficient, other parts go the other direction? Higher resolution screens, more sensors, radios with harder to implement requirements, and so on.

Most likely in my mind because phone makers would like you to purchase a new phone every 2 years, and a new battery only begins to degrade around that time as well.

Eh you seem to like conspiracy theories. Not to say there aren't conspiracies out there, but for some people this is the first and only explanation for everything. As you can see in the other comments there are technical reasons for what the phone makers are doing.

I mean, I enjoy using Apple products, but they quite literally paid out a very large lawsuit which found them culpable for planned obsolescence with iPhone 5 batteries and etc.

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