Comment by yaro330 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yaro330 | Hacker News Reader

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> Pixel 11 has an incremental upgrade to the CPU

You keep repeating this everywhere but this is just plainly wrong. They went from an old big.Little (with middle cores) arrangement that everyone abandoned for flagship chips generations ago, with core arches that were 2-3 generations behind competition, to a modern, up to date arrangement. There's literally nothing newer that they could've gotten from Arm, and other CPUs are releasing with C1 generation.

And I don't get your angle on the GPU. GOS is not gaming oriented, Pixels are not gaming oriented, and never were. They have a decent NPU to handle AI, a decent ISP to handle cameras, what more do you need the GPU for? Why would they put in a PC grade monster like Qualcomm?

Same for the modem, it's well known that Qualcomm are way ahead of the game, but they also charge like crazy for their SOCs and are a horrific partner to work with. They treat clients like shit, I get why Google ditched them when they were able to.

And you keep recommending P10 when it's genuinely a non improvement over P9, with worse battery life and running hotter, and the same modem. What the f is your angle? Is Micay back to GOS?

The CPU is 10-15% faster, that’s incremental in use even if it’s technically interesting.

Lots of apps and websites only run smoothly on newer GPUs, too. You can play the “they’re dumb and I just won’t use them” game, but not everybody has your priorities, and it’s a relevant factor either way.

The modem comment, likewise, is simply correct, and evaluating performance is good even when shortcomings are understandable.

They supported Pixel 10 because they supported every new Pixel that wasn’t a security downgrade and shortly preceding a better alternative. The logic isn’t “performance bad therefore no upgrade”, it’s “no upgrade for a bunch of other reasons, and it’s not like we’re missing out on a 3x performance improvement”.

> Lots of apps and websites only run smoothly on newer GPUs, too.

GPU is barely used in non-3D applications. My OP15 runs normal apps and websites just as well as my Pixel 10 Pro did. Speedometer 3.1 returns 10% higher scores in favour of the OP, even though it has the latest and greatest qcom chip.

UI experience is all about scheduler tuning, drawing pipeline optimizations and (to a much lesser degree) single core performance. Anything above Cortex X1 can have perfect 120 fps anywhere, without a major energy penalty, if the software is well optimized. I know because we did experiments like that when I was still doing custom Android kernels.

Not a single time did we need to do anything to the GPU, most of the time it's in 2D clocks and never wakes up.

> They supported Pixel 10 because they supported every new Pixel that wasn’t a security downgrade and shortly preceding a better alternative. The logic isn’t “performance bad therefore no upgrade”, it’s “no upgrade for a bunch of other reasons, and it’s not like we’re missing out on a 3x performance improvement”.

Not my question. I get why P10 was supported, I don't get why it's recommended by the person running the account, when it's objectively just a more expensive P9 with worse battery life and running warmer.

Pixel 10a is the most recently released recommended device. It has the same SoC as the 9th generation Pixels with a far better cellular radio than the Pixel 9a.

Pixel 9 to Pixel 10 had a bigger incremental CPU upgrade than the Pixel 10 to Pixel 11. GPU was initially a downgrade due to poor drivers but that was resolved already.

Pixel 10 has various small but significant security advantages over the Pixel 9. Pixel 11 would similarly have small security advantages if they hadn't ruined the overall security by removing MTE.

We definitely do want better CPU, GPU and radio performance for flagship devices and haven't been happy with those on Pixels. It doesn't outweigh security updates and security features but it matters to us. We're going to be a lot happier with a next gen flagship Snapdragon SoC for many reasons.

Getting a 15% increase to CPU performance is an incremental upgrade to the CPU performance. We expected a much better improvement from the new CPU architecture. It's quite disappointing and the removal of MTE support is even more disappointing. Using HWASan instead of MTE would have around 2x CPU overhead, 25% memory overhead and would not provide nearly as much of the security benefits due to only working for code instrumented with it. Compared to doing memory tagging using HWASan, decent MTE support is an incredible performance boost.

GrapheneOS works well for running games and people can toggle off hardened_malloc and MTE for a game to eliminate nearly all of the performance difference. It doesn't usually make any noticeable difference. GrapheneOS is intended to be fully usable by everyone including people who care about GPU performance whether it's for games or other apps. Claiming GrapheneOS isn't gaming focused is your opinion. We care a lot about compatibility with games and have put effort into it. Pixels using a GPU with poor gaming compatibility and performance wasn't our choice and doesn't mean we don't care about it.

> and the same modem

Pixel 10a has a drastically better cellular radio than the Pixel 9a. The 'a' series Pixels are consistently the most popular devices supported by GrapheneOS. Pixel 10a is still the latest one so there isn't going to be any gap in people being able to buy a new device for GrapheneOS if we don't add the Pixel 11 and instead skip right to Motorola flagships and then more Motorola devices. We hope the Pixel 12 adds back MTE support but aren't optimistic.

> back to GOS?

You're directing abusive comments towards our team based on highly inaccurate harassment content.

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