Hacker News Reader

Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

Not on Hacker News. On Hacker News your press conference should alternate new feature paragraphs with apologies.

"We have a new fingerprint sensor! But, you probably don't want to use it because privacy crazies online think Apple is a front for the NSA."

"We're moving to a 64-bit architecture! But, geeks with low reading comprehension think it's not that useful because we have tiny RAM, so you should just ignore this point too."

"We have the best mobile phone camera ever created! But, everything was already good enough, so we've probably just wasted two years developing this and wasting shareholder dollars instead of entering the virtual cow social abuse market."

View on HN

The Lumia 1020 will be hard to beat for the title of "best mobile phone camera ever created".

In terms of raw sensor performance, certainly. The new camera moves the software stack forward in a way that Nokia didn't though - extremely high frame rate to "catch" the best moment, programmatic selection of said moments, merging of exposure information across multiple consecutive frames, etc.

As a photo enthusiast that part of the presentation was a lot more exciting than the (rather marginal) improvements to lens and sensor.

You don't need to mess around with these software hacks when the hardware is as good as in the Lumia 1020. Besides these software features are already done in the HTC One (lookup 'Zoe'). Apple's playing catchup here.

I thought that the whole point of the 41 megapixel sensor was to give more information to those types "software hacks"!

Not that hard apparently.

http://www.tbreak.ae/features/camera-comparison-nokia-lumia-...

Who are "tbreak.ae"? That's not a very insightful review.

Many better known sites like DPReview.com think that the Lumia 1020 has the best smartphone camera:

http://connect.dpreview.com/post/5234892048/nokia-lumia-1020...

Best is too vague. My issue with it is that it's a huge bulge on the back of the phone, so in my mind it can't be the "best mobile phone camera ever created".

Lumia 1020 has very slow shot-to-shot and start times. On iPhone 5 I can start the camera app and shoot 9 images in 10 seconds. Just did it. On 1020 you might get 3 shots of in the same time. But the key is the time to first shot. On iPhone 5, from off to first shot is roughly 2.5 seconds, and just .5 of a second or so for the second. 1020 takes 4-5 seconds for first shot, another 2-3 seconds for the second (based on my experiments in the store).

Since most people use their cameras to shoot pictures of cute cats or children, and then upload them to FB, I think the vast majority of people would prefer the fast and very good quality of the iPhone over the slow but excellent quality of 1020.

I'll bite. Explaining to a "geek with low reading comprehension", what is the actual benefit to the iPhone being 64-bit?

Memory bus bandwidth - moving large chunks of data around just got twice as fast. That means loading textures for games, or hauling photos up from flash memory will be substantially faster now.

There's no mandatory relationship between word size and memory bus size. 128-bit memory busses were common well before 64-bit CPUs were.

Memory bus bandwidth has nothing whatsoever to do with CPU word size. You'll have to wait for LPDDR4 for an increase in memory bandwidth.

There are a lot of interesting things you can do with a massive address space even if you don't have the RAM to back it. You can mmap massive files. False pointers are virtually nonexistent for conservative GCs in a 64-bit environment (I believe modern Objective-C is compiler supported refcounting though so this doesn't really apply here). You can virtual alloc a 4GB array and just let it grow in physical memory on demand.

There is also a new instruction set to go along with the bump to 64-bits which improves things. However, I remember Herb Sutter saying that, in the case of x64, Microsoft generally found that the improved instruction set performance gains were a wash due to the increased cache misses caused by the doubling of the pointer width. I'm not sure how much ARM 64-bit instruction set improves things.

I'm definitely out of my depth here, I guess I just wasn't really convinced 32-bit was ever a ceiling on the iPhone. I'm sure Apple have their reasons though, and maybe massive files and 4GB arrays and really do matter to iPhone users more than I thought. I'm sure Apple have some reason beyond marketing, since I doubt the general consumer really cares.

> (I believe modern Objective-C is compiler supported refcounting though so this doesn't really apply here)

Yeah, I don't think they ever supported GC in iOS. Now that you mention it, it's probably not a coincidence that it was added to the Mac shortly after the entire product line had switched to 64-bit. You could still do it in 32-bit, but I doubt they were expecting many developers to start writing new 32-bit apps at that point.

What does use a conservative garbage collector on iOS, however, is Safari's JS engine. But I assume that the conservative scan is only used on the stack (that's what FF does), since it would be kind of silly to do a conservative scan of the heap for a language that doesn't support pointers. So it doesn't seem likely under normal circumstances that you'd have many false hits even with 32-bits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com