Bleep Qualcomm right in their Qualcomm-hole

If you wondered why I said

Maybe this will give you a clue:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-12/intel-to-add-its-support-to-ftc-lawsuit-against-qualcomm

Did it ever occur to anyone that having the entire Android ecosystem completely dependent on this one extremely mediocre company, might… not be a great idea? For a whole host of reasons? Why is it that you literally can’t buy any Android device not based on horseshit Qualcomm hardware?

Hell the obsolete Nexus 9 from years ago, on Nvidia’s Tegra K1, is still within 15% of the “fastest” and newest Qualcomm SoCs.

Where’s the damn platform diversity? Where’s the performance?

The current status quo is AndComm, like WinTel… except if Intel didn’t exist, only AMD … and they shipped lame Bulldozer cores forever.

I actually agree with you that it would be great to have more diversity. On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time I thought, “I wish my phone were faster”, and I’ve owned Android phones since at least 2011 (Note 1, Nexus 5, Moto X Play).

It’s not really Qualcomms fault. If phone vendors wanted better chips, they’d ask for them.

One of the big reasons Imagination Technologies recently got shafted by Apple was that their non-Apple sales had dried up, and what they did sell to non-Apple were the smaller, cheaper, older, lower core count GPUs. IMG had loads of high end designs proven* in Apple’s lightning fast products, but no one else seemed to want it. (In only in a few cases do I feel this was IMG’s fault, e.g. wrecking the relationship with Intel)

Probably because Android phone ownership is something of a race to the bottom.and an attempt to have everyone own 5 terrible smartphones each.

  • Assuming you ignore Apple’s increasing alteration of the designs through the years

I hated life so much when I was using the Nexus 5 back in 2014. Everything was balls slow. I wanted to force myself to use an Android device full time to see how the other side lived and get Android experience. I like the Android software, since Android 5 Google has done a solid job on UI. It’s just that the hardware is … terribad.

My view is that my phone should be 80% as fast as a superportable laptop in practice, and ideally 100% as fast. The iPhone 7 is damn close to that. Damn close. The endgame is to plug your phone into a display and keyboard, and have at it. I’m really curious to see how much faster the iPhone 8 is later this year.

On the Android side, we’ve already seen the entirety of 2017 because the 835 is all there is, and it … sucks … per my graph in the first post. So it’ll be 2018 before there are any meaningful performance improvements in Android.

We know your opinion but it just isn’t what the average Android phone owner is interested in. You are not speaking to the converted but the not interested.

Oh gee, another Android bashing thread from Wumpus. Woopdie fucking do.

Yeah we’re obviously not interested in the same things. All I know is that my phone opens my Google Inbox and weather app BLAZINGLY fast.

Most people that get android phones do so because of their value. Most people are not interested that you can have apps opened 1.1 seconds faster or that their web page will loads 0.9 secs quicker. They don’t want the supercar of phones but are happy it’s family 4 door with good miles to the gallon.

It is like trying to explain to a Dodge Charger owner why you bought a Prius.

I miss the smoothness of WP7 and WP8, even on a $40 phone.I have yet to find an Android or iPhone that held up to that.

But I recognize I"m an anomaly so I’ll crawl back into my hole.

The difference is that on a PC, you would get a supercar at any price due to the march of Moore’s Law. Particularly at the equivalent point in early PC history that mobile is at today; I figure smartphones are maybe at about the year 2000 in PC time.

It is an absolute travesty that Qualcomm has single-handedly created a suck vortex large enough to negate Moore’s Law.

I mean my Galaxy S7E chugs every time I open up fucking Boggle so maybe there’s something to this @wumpus loon’s crazed ravings o.O

I don’t understand this argument. It is entirely use case dependant. If you are saying a $500 laptop or whatever is more than sufficient for the average user then sure. But if you want to 4k game, do serious compiling or video work you are going to be seriously restricted at the lower end. So you seem to be using the average consumer for your PC comparison.

But on the phone side you seem to be using some very power user use case if you think that a Galaxy S8 is insufficient. Hell I’m writing this on an S6 that I am perfectly happy with that I have no particular interest in upgrading.

And I am not some tech oblivious person. At work I max out my dual e5-2690 machine when I am compiling and automated testing. I can not get a super car for that use case at any price. Arguably I can’t get a super car for that use case at all because intel has been pretty stagnant at the high end for a while now.

But my mobile use case is pretty average: email, web browsing, little gaming, music. My phone is totally good at all of those things. I honestly don’t even care about upgrading although eventually I will.

I just have to say that more speed is not for the sake of it. More people will be able to make apps, apps made with something like ionic will feel more native. Before anybody shout at me their opinion about not native apps, with more CPU they will feel native.

The difference is that is the PC market in 2015+; go back in time to anno domini 2000, which is the rough equivalent of where smartphones are today.

Sure, it’s totally understandable if smartphone performance is stagnant in 2027. But today? Absolutely not. That’d be like defending a 10% performance increase from Intel across 2001-2004.

I wonder what it is you’re doing on your phone that you have this need for speed.

My LG V20 is super speedy for what I need: surfing the web with several windows open, writing email, downloading the occasional PDF or spreadsheet, taking and looking at pictures, occasional youtube videos and once in a blue moon Netflix viewing, with a handful of occasional games thrown in. Sure, it’s a new phone but I was equally satisfied with last year’s V10, the Galaxy 6 before that, the Galaxy 4 before that and the Galaxy 2 before that.

It’s like complaining about Ulv chips used in ultraportables. Sure, there are those that will definitely need a fast quad core i7 chip in a large chassis with huge fans and a graphics card but for many people a low voltage dual core i5 is more than fast enough especially if it means a thinner, lighter case you can toss in a bag without breaking your back.

In the year 2000, desktop CPUs were being built on a 180nm process. Dennard scaling was still in full force. That’s basically process advances giving 100x the transistors and maybe 5x perf/power. What about today’s mobile CPUs? They’re looking at getting maybe one more doubling of transistor count (and maybe not even that), and with no “free” process-driven perf/watt improvements.

The proper analogue of today’s mobile CPUs aren’t the desktop CPUs of 2000. It’s the desktop CPUs of 2017.

I am VASTLY more frustrated by the limitations of iOS than I am by the speed of Qualcomm chips. If I’m not watching a video showing a non-use case scenario of launching every single app on the home screen, I never think about the speed of my phone (Pixel XL). It’s super fast at everything. Now getting iOS to autofill an app with Lastpass credentials, downloading an MP3 from the web to quickly change a ringtone, using a file manager, put on icon where I want it on screen and have it stay there, without auto-sorting from the top… The pain and TIME involved in getting things done on an iPhone that are non-issues on Android isn’t worth it to me.

That said, I’d love it if Apple sold their CPUs to other vendors.

Yes indeed, let’s talk about today’s mobile CPUs, shall we?

https://mobile.twitter.com/codinghorror/status/847572056807948288

And looking back just a few years…

So unless you believe that Apple has some kind of unobtanium driving their mobile CPU design, I refer you to the thesis in the title of this topic.

I’ve had an S7 edge, which cost about $300, and it does everything I need great… of course I did upgrade from an S2 so maybe my bar is low… I don’t have an application where I need it to have more cpu power. So while more power would be great, in actual real terms I love it way more than my work Iphone 6s plus.