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Comment by hardware2win | Hacker News Reader

Why do we waste state of art, bleeding edge CPUs manufacture capabilities on some telephones?

Who needs phones this fast?

Why do we waste state of art, bleeding edge manufacture capabilities on some cars? Who needs cars this fast? Who needs newer cars?

To give you some answer. I'd say that newer technology enables the following, completely not exhaustive list:

- Macbooks that can run on a single charge for whole day and have very high performance.

- Cameras in pocket/phone that almost no-one except professional photographers have to carry photo equipment

- Electric cars which can finally travel such distance that they are actually useful

- Combustion cars so that every city we live is not toxic. And they get to be economic too.

- Comfort within a car which we value.

- Phones are small (oh sorry this can cause flamewars, so let's say it like this - circuits get small)

- Technology demand, whether it comes from manufacturing phones or something else, benefits making computers (i.e Apple Silicion was for phones/tables, now for macs). It benefits other vendors as they get to access the technology too. So much investments enables TSMC to actually enable the technology.

Simple. It takes time to get state of the art, bleeding edge CPU nodes to the point where they can have a consistently high yield of large-die-area chips, such as desktop processors. Yields on a new production line are often poor due to the many defects that would take out far too many large chips, but allows decent yields of smaller chips. Thus, the typical node starts manufacturing on small chips and works its way upward to larger chips as yields improve.

That or you produce defect resistant large chips like FPGAs which can literally route around any defect.

But FPGAs, despite being way faster than software, are only ~1/5th to ~1/10th as fast as dedicated silicon, at best, on a small scale. An Apple M1 in FPGA would run like it was manufactured 2 decades ago, if not worse.

Plus, FPGAs get absolutely huge with terrible yields for complex work. RED Cameras have a massive, multi-thousand-dollar FPGA (crossing over $10K as a part), and it is only powerful enough to process their custom video codec and nothing else. Still cheaper than designing a custom chip for that considering how niche RED Cameras are, but absolutely stupid for anything broader. An FPGA that could run an M1 equivalent would be larger than the laptop, cost over $100K, and be slow as a turtle racing across Oregon.

That doesn't change the fact FPGAs have stupid high yields.

They're extremely popular devices, people are actively demanding more from them every single year, companies use these marginal improvements as selling points, and these devices cost upwards of a thousand dollars, bringing a healthy profit.

It's just the perfect storm.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the "storm" word. Phone consumers seem to be a little bit irrational. E.g. friend has a phone with insane screen resolution and refresh rate. People will argue consumers want better battery life but this is meaningless. Processor efficiency increases, software gets bloated and we are back at square one. Every phone in the last decade has been a "one day" battery life.

You hit the nail on the head... a few years back my phone was a de-Googled Motorola running LineageOS. It had no push notifications or any third-party apps on it besides Spotify and ProtonMail and I could go several days without charging it. My current-generation iPhone has superior hardware in every respect and it's down to 50% after a day of usage.

You need about 1400 calories a day, 2l of water, a 40x40x180cm box to stand in, somewhere to drain your waste, and a temperature that is about 20-24 degrees. Oh and some oxygen

Everything else is want and as a society, we agreed that you don't need to justify your want.

Whether that is a bottle of beer or a new smartphone.

what if i told you that society doesn't guarantee needs

Then you would make a simple statement that is neither new or relevant?

> Who needs phones this fast?

Programmers who cut corners while writing phone software.

to be somewhat kinder, high compression video codecs eg h265 benefit from fast phones

True, but the benefits from dedicated decoding hardware would be higher.

Because that's a market driven way to push the limits of science and it serves the purpose of humanity: better, faster, stronger.

Better battery life?

Or more likely with Apple the ability to get the same battery life with a thinner phone.

a rather old opinion: the race for thinness in Apple design has been over for, like, 3-5 years now? They hit a local maxima and also learned when they went too far. Now products, like MacBook Pros and iPad Pros, are returning to a bit more of their "ideal" sizes.

Replace the word phone with computer and ask the question again.

The same question applies. It seems that Moore's law improvements on speed and power consumption over the past ~10 years have served only to help programmers write shittier more bloated software such that the net performance and efficiency gain is zero or slightly negative.

Moore claims that CPU's will double in power/efficiency given a specific increment of time (e.g. n years). That hasn't been happening for at least ~10 years now so I'm not sure how mentioning it actually applies here.

The point I was making is that it's not a phone anymore, it's a full fledge computer that is arguably more advanced than your average desktop.

Because 95% of people think their computers are fast enough but want more battery life on their phone I suppose.

My random ass phone survives something like a few days of random usage

Do we need more?

Have you considered that your usage pattern may be atypical?

Yes, but I dont believe that theres this many phone addicted ppl

You don't have to be phone-addicted for your phone usage to keep going up. In a lot of societies ever more daily tasks continue to migrate off PC and onto phone apps. The number of services you interact with primarily through your phone (say, booking a hairdresser appointment or getting notified your dry-cleaning is done) keep going up everywhere. People use their phone for contactless NFC payments, for public transit check-in/check-out, etc. Having enough charge to last the day becomes increasingly not optional.

Everyone gets habituated by context to look at the thing more and more as the gateway to everything.

I think for most people, up until perhaps very recently, their phone usage patterns have continued to scale with the improvements in efficiency and performance and progress has been very stagnant. As in, the 2-3 phones they've had over the last 5-6 years all get through the day and then it's charging time if you want to be OK on the next day. Even if you're on 40% at the end of the day, you still have to charge.

The two-day mainstream smartphone phone is not here yet.

My cheap chinese phone lasted almost a week, over 5 years. I got a new flagship Samsung one, somehow the thing loses around 30% battery every day even if I do nothing. I think manufacturers need more efficient phones to keep doing whatever the heck they are doing, it's not like the "user" owns these things.

Until you discover that any new performance/efficiency discovery gets spent on more bloated software.

Smartphone volume is subsidizing the research, development, and capital investment for these nodes.

It's not just for phones--these nodes end up powering everything. But it starts with phones because that's where the money is.

By all means use a slower phone. And I’ll keep using a faster one that saves me seconds a day which cumulatively turn into minutes which cumulatively turn into hours to do other things with my life.

They don’t specifically need fast, they need power efficiency. Better power efficiency means lighter, thinner or more capable phones with longer battery life.

Because cell phones processors have to be very efficient

'cause Apple push and pay for the node advancement.

Would you rather to have Intel keep pushing 14nm+++?

Because under capitalism, market forces of supply and demand guide production.

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