Hacker News Reader

Comment by vitobcn | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I don't understand why manufacturers are still optimizing CPU performance instead of battery life. Who really needs a 4 or even 8-core mobile device? Most people I know with a smartphone, barely make it through the day and I often see them charging their phones at work.

In my opinion, companies should follow Lenovo's lead and address battery life concerns. A phone like the P780, with a 4000mAh battery, is spec'd to last for 36 talking hours [1] and it can easily be used for 2-3 days without charging.

I don't believe it is directly commercialized in the US, but the price point is not far from this Motorola, as it can be acquired from China for around 230-250 USD (e.g. through aliexpress).

[1]: http://shop.lenovo.com/ae/en/smartphones/p-series/p780/

View on HN

"I don't understand why manufacturers are still optimizing CPU performance instead of battery life."

Maybe the simple answer is that they do not priorize processor power over battery life. Maybe they invest in both, but make more progress in the former than the latter.

I think one argument is that if you have multiple cores you can switch most of them into powersaving mode when they're unused, so you can have lower power use overall with more cores since max utilization won't be reached as often.

That works out, if individual cores are nice and low power. An 8-core 600MHz, for example, would really live up to that ideal. But a 1.2GHz 8-core?

Who needs a 4 core device? Android users.

Try getting an Android 4 device with 4 cores and 2 cores and compare them. The performance difference is stark. The 2 core devices feel very sluggish on Android 4.

There's absolutely no performance difference whatsoever in normal usage. Really, none. Squat. Zilch. Zero.

GPU performance and memory bandwidth are waaaaaaay more important than an extra 2 cores that'll be turned off 99% of the time anyway.

Tell that to my garbage Motorola Photon which had a graphics chip

All phones have a graphics chip, that doesn't mean it's a GOOD graphics chip. It also very much doesn't mean that it's fast enough for the screen resolution.

In the case of your Photon it was also running Gingerbread which didn't have 2D hardware acceleration. Made especially worse by the fact that Tegra 2 doesn't have NEON, so the software painting was extra slow on that device AND it had a "high" resolution.

It was a badly designed device from top to bottom. A quad core wouldn't have done a damn thing to help its pitiful performance (especially as there's still only a single UI thread doing the painting)

No it was not running Gingerbread, the first thing I did was hack it. It was running Cyanogen based on Ice Cream Sandwich.

I would not be surprised by the fact that it was poorly designed, and it's the main reason I will did not nor will not consider another Motorola phone in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com