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Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand why we are putting this kind of computational power in mobile phones. I mean, for the daily usage of almost everyone, I don't even see the difference between a Samsung Galaxy S3 (or an iPhone 5) and my phone which is a Wiko Cink Slim. Yes the phone I'm using is only dual-core at 1 GHz and not a 1.5 GHz quad-core, yes it "only" has 512 Mo of RAM instead of 1 or 2 Go, yes its screen pixel density is less impressive (but still more than two times better than what we have on laptop screens). But I actually can't see a difference when I'm using it: it is as fluid and as responsive. The main difference I see is that I paid my phone less than 150€ while the Galaxy S3 or the iPhone 5 are four times more expensive than that.

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Because 64 KB of RAM should be enough for everybody, right? Common, just because phones seem fast enough for everything right now, there's always the next killer app lurking around the corner waiting for a little increase in performance to happen. What about really good AR? You think that's gonna be cheap on the hardware? Or driving external monitors, using as phone as laptop replacement, with a full blown OS? HN of all places should understand this!

"Come on" or "C'mon" or , not "Common".

I don't understand the idea that, given the opportunity, one would willingly put less power into a computer.

My bank account understands. My phone's battery too. I'm not saying we should not build powerful phones, but why would I spend more money to have something better if I can have something less expensive which is more than enough already?

Then don't buy it.

I've been using a Droid Incredible for 2 years. It was released 1.5 years before that. It handles all of my mobile computing needs just fine, CM7.2 is sturdy as hell (just passed 30 days uptime) and I haven't spent money on mobile hardware for 2 years.

I've gone wifi-only since buying this phone. I have wifi everywhere I need it except grocery store checkout lines. The phone lasts 2 days on a charge in perpetual airplane mode too.

because this is the future: http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android

the definition of "enough" will change in 2013

Battery? It just disables all the excess cores when it doesn't need them. Your bank account is a different matter though.

Not just phones though is it?

This thing will sit in tablets, nettops, maybe even consoles.

I know the steambox is likely to be x86, but with the power on offer here you could certainly make a living room media-box and games-machine in one.

Smartphones are really trending towards becoming full blown computers. As of today our current crop of Smartphones is riddled with various 90's era limitations like restrictions on multitasking, inability to elegantly drive a big external display, lack of richer integration between apps (Android has it to a great degree but still it only gets better with more RAM and faster CPUs) etc. Plus we rely on web applications performing at near native speeds more and more - HTML5 is not free - CPU and GPU play great part in making the browser realize the near native performance and features.(JS/WebGL etc.)

So in so much as we can do more faster with our phones I think it is not a bad thing to add computational power into our phones. One day we will all have one handheld to rule it all - phone, tablet, desktop with external display, gaming console etc.

Let me tell you the reason: No laptop.

Imagine that you just dock your phone into a screen when you want to work and that you don't have to haul a laptop around with you anymore. To get there, we need the machine-power-per-square-inch to shrink further and this is what drives that.

I find my old Desire HD to be strapped for RAM when running Chrome on 4.2, and it comes with 512MiB. And given the low price and space impact, I'm happy to see them stuff as much of it in there as they can justify.

You also have to remember that these clock numbers don't really mean anything. The processors are designed for low power consumption, and frankly, it shows.

Because of the way adoption of new technology works, there will always be a large group, even a majority, for whom the status quo is good enough. I don't have the fantasy to see what this chip can do for me, luckily others do, and I suspect that I will be giving them my money soon.

- >I mean, for the daily usage of almost everyone, I don't even see the difference between a Samsung Galaxy S3 (or an iPhone 5) and my phone which is a Wiko Cink Slim.

I do.

Could you expand a bit? I'm genuinely interested. What kind of activity do you use your phone for that requires so much computational power that you actually see the difference between a 1GHz dual-core and a 1.5GHz quad-core?

I max out my 1 GB of RAM on my S3 easily when switching between Spotify, Whats app and Chrome with 10 Tabs open. Why do I open 10 tabs on my cell phone? My subway ride to work is about 35 minutes and the timeframe where I have HDSPA is 5 minutes after that no more mobile internet until I get back overground. It's enough for exchanging a few Whats app messages though.

Editing video, multi track audio recording/synthesis, 3D gaming.

Okay, I guess that's more a tablet (iPad, Galaxy Tab) than a phone usage but it still is a valid answer here.

Opening iBooks on my iPad 2 takes 3-10 seconds. I'd love to see that shrink to 20 milliseconds. Until then, I'm not satisfied.

Tasks as basic as browsing.

Speech recognition and Augmented Reality apps will benefit from it. Photo apps that stitch a lot of pictures together, like Google's new Photo Sphere panorama app. I figure the new chips will also make stitching more accurate in the future.

Higher resolutions, especially for tablets. For example iPad 4 has only now gotten enough GPU performance to be as fast as iPad 2 running at its old native resolution. So iPad 4 at 2048x1536 is as fast as iPad 2 at 1024x768.

So basically the iPad has stagnated for a year and a half in performance, just to get the benefit of that crisper display. And only with new upcoming chips, the iPad will start to get higher performance for native-resolution apps.

I see.

However, about speech recognition for instance, it is for now done "in the cloud": your recorded voice is sent to a server which does the intensive computations and sends the corresponding text back to your phone. Why would that change? It even allows Google or Apple to train their speech recognition system so I think they will want to keep it that way.

More generally, more and more computation are done in the cloud, even on the desktop (Chrome OS).

That said, I agree about high-res gaming and augmented reality, etc.

Speech recognition is done on device in android jelly bean. It takes about 1 second per word but it is very accurate in my experience.

Latency isnt going down.

There is still perceptible difference performance wise between iPhone 4S and iPhone 5, but I wonder if that still be the case comparing iPhone 5 and the next model. I really see no lag now, except for network activity sometimes, but that is also the case for desktop. I am not much of a gamer, so GPU does not mean much to me past the smooth scrolling, but iPhone had that since 2007, so…

Its marketing. Those phones render pages relatively slow compared to my pc, and thats not just "software is better optimized on x86".

Also, hopefully, the more power for the same TDP, the sooner we can get phones which much better TDP for the same power /hopes

Well, no matter the CPU power, etc. but I can tell you my Galaxy S3 still manages to exhibit (occasionally infuriatingly) long lag spikes when opening the browser; SMS messaging app; gallery (both built-in and QuickPic)... and other tasks.

The same reason why you need more than 640K of RAM. Unlimited wants vs limited resources. Put in what you can and what is possible because wants are unlimited.

My only concern is not that they are making them more powerful for the same power consumption as before (instead of making them more efficient - use Cortex A7-only devices, if you want that), but that they are making them more powerful just a little more than they should, with each generation, to stay ahead of the other guy, and therefore compromise on energy efficiency, and make it a little worse than before. And before we know it, the phone is running on 2 or 4 W under maximum load, instead of 1W, as initially.

However this also may be because when they make the chip twice as fast - for the same content as before - and using the same energy, that means that once content catches up with the chip, and is 2x more bloated/advanced, then the chip will consume twice as much energy processing it. I'm making it sound a lot more simplistic than it probably happens, though.

Because it's 2012.

We don't only use the phone for calls, but also for:

1) high performance 3D games 2) demanding web use, with Canvas, SVG and other technologies 3) image editing 4) movie editing 5) audio editing 6) hi-res video capture and playback

And at some point we will do several of those at once.

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