![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
4MM iPhones Sold. 4S On Track to Becoming the Fastest Selling Consumer Device Ever
- Thread starter mobusta1
- Start date
I call it the power of marketing and the gullibility of people. At least Kinect was a revolutionary device. With iPhone, I think there were millions of people just waiting for the next version, and would have bought whatever device Apple announced. The Apple brand is that strong.
Electrofreak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,080
Suckers.
Tell that to my Sega Activator. Looks like everyone takes an old "new" idea and just makes it better these days.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with being the fastest (accordint to benchmarks) phone, with the best resolution screen, the best batter life, the best media ecosystem, the best and easiest to use cloud system, the smoothest UI, the most powerful graphics (with the actual ability to use the GPU), the most premium build materials, the best customer support, and the best app store.
Its the marketing.
Logic isn't applied when it comes to Apple products. True while it isn't the greatest thing ever, it is still a solid phone that sports a lot of positives and delivers a great experience. The new Nexus Prime and razr are pretty slick looking, but their UI and hardware acceleration are still lacking compared to that of the 4s.
According to this...its the best ever.
By a LARGE margin.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4951/...rks-800mhz-a5-slightly-slower-gpu-than-ipad-2
Time to think again broseph.
Not true at all. Samsung Nexus & ICS do have hardware acceleration
http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-4.0.html
Never said they didn't have hardware acceleration, try re-reading the post, I said that it is lacking compared to that of the 4s. Lacking means it isn't up to par compared to what the iPhone 4s offers.
According to your article, the iPhone 4s is compared to previous versions of Android and the authors even say this and that they expect ICS to fully bridge the gulf, especially since the Galaxy Tab, which is HC, is beating or close to the 4s in multiple benchmarks, so no I don't need to "think again"
Last edited:
Apallohadas
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2004
- Messages
- 2,795
Did you watch the unveiling or read the initial impression of the nexus? If so then you would have saw first hand or read how it still felt sluggish compared to ios. Have you used a Motorola android phone? If so then once again you know how shoddy and sluggish the ui feels on them. And yes I do have a 4s nothing special about it but it is much more snappy and responsive then either the charge and the thunderbolt.
Apallohadas
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2004
- Messages
- 2,795
So your other post, and this one here, speaking as though you own two phones that have not yet been released...
Well that'd be you talking completely out of your ass then wouldn't it? Cram the attitude bud, you look bad enough pretending that you have first hand information and ranting like a loose fanboy.
Electrofreak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,080
I watched it live and watched hands-on demos afterwards, and I saw something that destroys the iPhone 4S in terms of features and was very smooth and responsive. Those are some pretty strong Apple goggles you've got there.
I would wait until you have a production device in hands.....
The below is what I saw when watching a couple videos, I did not see this sluggish response. It's nice to know that a couple of devices might have just been early.
Per Engadget
Update: turns out our demo phone was a bit of an early build; we touched another model later in the day, and our response gripes were gone. Perfectly responsive. Hopefully that's the one that'll ship out.
So android with it's 50%+ market share is all just the smartest people in the world, and not just a situation in which every dumb mouth breather goes in to buy a phone and gets the free android crap device of the month, huh?
I predict with most major carriers on board, and with the 3gs being free, android will start to lose quite a bit of marketshare. People with 2yr contracts who have been stuck with their POS free android handset are not going to get another one, they'll get something that they know puts out a fantastic product.
Apallohadas
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2004
- Messages
- 2,795
The great thing about web predictions is that you can come back and delete your post when you're wrong.
I predict that Pamela Anderson will write a novella on horse trading in Persia.
I predict that Pamela Anderson will write a novella on horse trading in Persia.
Electrofreak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,080
Tell me, what's it like to be so naive?
I bet none of those features include gaming performance. Just when it could have been a grand slam this happens:
Electrofreak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,080
Gonna just quote myself from another thread to explain this; GPUs are not like CPUs in ARM SoCs; the model number tells you absolutely nothing about the performance that the GPU will be capable of.
I've done a lot of reading on smartphone GPUs, and frankly, it all comes down to clock speed and available memory bandwidth. Since the GPUs share the RAM with the CPU, GPU performance is frequently bottlenecked by the speed of the RAM and the memory controller (because it also has to be managing memory for the CPU).
The reason we're seeing such an explosion in GPU processing power, and the reason an "old" GPU like the SGX540 can be dropped into the Nexus Prime and perform several times faster than it has in previous SoCs like the original Galaxy S phones is because the GPU can be clocked at more than twice the speed due to greatly reduced memory bandwidth limitations via dual-channel LPDDR2 (as opposed to the previous LPDDR1) and dual-channel memory controllers, as well as improved memory management in the Cortex-A9 architecture.
So there's really no way to quantify GPU performance without taking into account memory clock speed and bandwidth as well as GPU clock speed.
Hope this makes sense.I'm wondering when we're going to start seeing dedicated GPU memory... that's when it'll start to get crazy.
In short, the SGX540 clock speeds and performance in many previous SoCs have been choked by memory bandwidth speeds and a single memory controller. With those limitations removed, we should see some pretty reasonable performance. Perhaps not record-setting, but competitive with other GPUs like Mali-400, Adreno 220, and NVIDIA's ULP GeForce.
EDIT - I'll point out that not all of this is stuff I learned from reading. A former engineer for TI explained GPU memory bandwidth limitations to me about a year and a half ago when I was doing research for an article on Hummingbird and Snapdragon architectures.
EDIT2 - Here's some graphs to chew on: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4686/samsung-galaxy-s-2-international-review-the-best-redefined/17
That AnandTech review is for the Mali-400 GPU performance in the Samsung Galaxy S II, which is certainly impressive. You can see the SGX540 running in the TI OMAP4430 is no slouch though, coming in second or third in most instances. Assume that it'll be clocked a bit higher in the TI OMAP4460 in the Galaxy Nexus (I'm guessing 20-25%, and you can get a ballpark for the kind of performance we'll be seeing.
UPDATE: Looks like I was close, it'll be upclocked from 304 MHz to 384 MHz, for a ~26% increase in performance over the TI OMAP4430. Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4551/motorola-droid-3-review-third-times-a-charm/10
Aannnnd just for some interesting reading, this is worth checking out: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4686/samsung-galaxy-s-2-international-review-the-best-redefined/15
It explains why the PowerVR GPUs are able to do so well under tight memory bandwidth limitations and on applications not optimized for early-z because they utilize TBDR with order independent hidden surface removal.
Last edited:
Yeah, but it's competing against a SGX543MP2.
Electrofreak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,080
I think you missed the point. The SGX543MP2 is a blazing-fast dual-core GPU. But the clock speed it runs at is dependent upon memory bandwidth. Both the iPhone 4S and the Galaxy Nexus feature 32-bit dual-channel LPDDR2 modules (at anyone's guess for the clock speed).
So, while Apple can drop a crazy powerful GPU into an A5, and TI can drop a ho-hum GPU into the OMAP4460, they're both subject to the amount of memory bandwidth available.
Capiche?
EDIT - Looks like the SGX540 in the Galaxy Nexus is likely to be clocked at 384 MHz, which is 26% faster than the SGX540 in the OMAP4430 in the Droid 3 and the Droid Bionic. Given Anandtech's recent review of the SGX543MP2, we can expect GPU performance of the Galaxy Nexus to be roughly half that of the iPhone 4S. If each GPU in the SGX543MP2 is able to access a separate memory controller, this would make sense, and would be something I haven't accounted for.
On the other hand, Galaxy Nexus also has a 50% faster CPU. Since the OMAP 4460 is rated to run at 1.5 GHz but is downclocked to 1.2 GHz in the Galaxy Nexus, I don't doubt it'll easily hit speeds of 1.6 GHz and higher; twice the clock speed of the iPhone 4S. If you're willing to root and OC your Galaxy Nexus, it would simply be a tradeoff, half the GPU speed for twice the CPU speed.
Last edited:
amusing...rabid fanboy eh?No clue what you're referring to, especially considering I have every intention of buying the Nexus Prime. I'm pretty stoked for ICS. Maybe you're reading too much into my post, but the information I read after the unveiling from multiple sources all talked about how sluggish the UI still felt compared to IoS. This has been a constant complaint for the last couple years in regards to Android, and is noticable in non rooted Thunderbolts, and appeared to continue over to the Nexus Prime.
This is good news. On this is my next they talked about how sluggish it was, but later posted that the devices were being pretty much maxed out with apps and tasks running all at the same time for the show and that they were optimistic it wouldn't be so bad at launch as well as a few tweaks were still incoming. I was only sharing the complaints from the reviewers but even regardless of slowdown or sluggishness the leaps and bounds ICS has made over Gingerbread is pretty fascinating and I can't be more stoked for a phone than the new Nexus.
Electrofreak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,080
My mistake, I didn't read those reviews, I only watched the show live, and then watched some hands-on videos afterwards where it looked smooth. My assumption was that you were just another raving iDiot.
And holy crap, I just realized I posted ALL that crap about the Galaxy Nexus in a freakin' iPhone fanboi thread. What a waste.
In about a week benchmarks will be all over the web. We already know the iPad 2's SGX543MP2 delivered a tremendous beat down on the competition and the iPad 2 is already 7 months old. The Galaxy Nexus' SGX540 will have to ridiculously fast to destroy, as you put it, the iP4s.
Electrofreak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,080
Check the post again, I threw an edit in there. I think I have Galaxy Nexus GPU performance pretty well ballparked. ~26% better than the Droid 3 and the Droid Bionic. Result; roughly half the performance of the SGX543MP2. If those each of those dual GPUs can access a separate memory channel each, it makes sense.
That said, the Galaxy Nexus has a 50% faster CPU at 1.2 GHz and OMAP 4460 is technically rated to 1.5GHz should have no difficulty being a twice as fast CPU with a little root 'n OC. Probably could just use OMAP 4460 stock voltage, but maybe they have it downclocked to keep heat low or something.
havermeyer
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Nov 17, 2010
- Messages
- 254
The question I ask is: does it even matter than the SGX543MP2 is far more powerful than the SGX540? Most of us are benchmark junkies here (and I am too), but it misses the current big picture.
I agree largely with this article: http://tech.icrontic.com/news/iphone-4s-gpu/ 2D games with simple/clever controls (Angry Birds, Flight Control, Cut the Rope, etc.) are more fun than 3D games with crappy on-screen d-pads, specially at phone-screen sizes. Wide spread support for controllers like http://www.icontrolpad.com/ would be a good start.
It's great that the SGX543MP2 in the IP2/IP4S will drive graphics development, but it hardly matters to me now. We'll see if it matters in two years.
I agree largely with this article: http://tech.icrontic.com/news/iphone-4s-gpu/ 2D games with simple/clever controls (Angry Birds, Flight Control, Cut the Rope, etc.) are more fun than 3D games with crappy on-screen d-pads, specially at phone-screen sizes. Wide spread support for controllers like http://www.icontrolpad.com/ would be a good start.
It's great that the SGX543MP2 in the IP2/IP4S will drive graphics development, but it hardly matters to me now. We'll see if it matters in two years.
Outamyhead
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2008
- Messages
- 4,263
It has it's advantages, as well as some horrible limitations...I don't believe the average iPhone customer will give a f#@k about the iCloud (too busy asking stupid questions with Siri), best screen is debatable, quickly going to be outmatched by Nexus Prime, next month, Samsung Note, and the Galaxy S2 already has it beat on size and quality. Might be more premium materials used, but if you drop that thing, it's going to break...one side or the other, battery life is pretty much even to anything else on the market.
Media on the iPhone is a joke, unless they have added FLAC, MKV support, and pretty much every other format besides Apple's own formats, and playlist only music selection, I just want to throw whatever I have on my phone for media, not screw around with iTunes making a bloody playlist, or adding movies that iTunes is aware of, then sitting about waiting for the thing to sync (which has taken about 30 minutes on some occasions).
Just not enough innovation to keep me with Apple, and too restricted on what you can and cannot do.
Until I see something other than hype from Apple, I won't buy another of their phones in the near future, they need to drastically up the hardware and get ahead of what the Android phones are doing, and probably rethink their attitude on end user limitations if they want to get people back.
Zumino Zufeilon
Gawd
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2004
- Messages
- 917
Why though? If it's just "hype", why does it outperform every other option on the market, by a significant margin, in every test that I'm aware of?
In a ultra-low power mobile device, software optimization and implimentation offer huge performance advantages. This is where iOS excels, and it's why so many seriously techy people are willing to deal with a locked interface.
Seriously, how many tech's, actual, honest to god, real tech's, have iPhones (be it 3gs/4/4s?). These are the people who "should know better", and yet we use iPhones. Many of us have had a variety of Android devices, before switching to iOS.
It's about implimentation.
In a desktop environment, implimentation is of limited value (though a slightly lower power bill is nice, and the stability that is a side-effect of good implimentation is handy also).
In a laptop environment, implimentation is very handy (significantly longer battery life, and higher stability again)
In a ultra-portable, mobile environment, implimentation is king. Just by being "more efficient", you can save tremendous amounts of battery life, and there is limited battery to carry around. And you can get much higher performance out of "lesser spec hardware".
The iPhone4 should have been destroyed by almost every new Android device over the past 9 months, and raw spec-wise, it was. And yet, in real-world evaluations, it consistently placed at or near the top. Even though it was "obsolete tech".
Apple does implimentation better then anyone on the market at the moment. A major reason for that is the locked platform. It limits the variability out there, which in turn creates a fixed, and very predicitable set of hardware spec's to optimize to, which allows the optimizers to really crank it up to eleven!
You mention features and options that, by their design, are relatively inefficient, and complain that an iPhone doesn't give you the option of using them. Never acknowledging that a quick format conversion into one of the power-efficient options solves your problem.
You mention that people 'won't give a f#@k about the iCloud", while not realizing that the free iCloud service gets you 5gb of storage, which is more then most people have with Dropbox, or that single program installed on your computer (pc or mac) will sync damn near everything through iCloud to your iPhone. I already know computer idiots that LOVE that, because they had such a PITA setting it up before on their Android (or iPhone) device.
You complain about iTunes, not realizing you don't need to use iTunes, and haven't needed it in years. Sure, it's the default software, but there are other options that work just fine.
Lastly, I have to laugh at your "get people back". This is a thread about how the iPhone4s is set to be the fastest selling consumer device ever. They don't need to "get people back". Apple is doing just fine. Android has surpassed iOS as an operating system, only recently and only because of two factors, "free" phone options, and having a huge variety of phones on every provider.
What you forget, is until the release of the 4s, the fastest selling smartphone in the world was the iPhone4, and the second fastest was the 3gs. Even now, I wouldn't be surprised if it's iPhone4s/iPhone4/iPhone3gs as nos. 1, 2 and 3.
You really have to watch out on making fanboi/iDiot and fandroid/hater accusations.
I would like to bash Google on not implementing "multitasking" like Apple and Microsoft does. The only backgrounds tasks that should be running are basic phone operations. The rest should be pushed into a stack when not being in used. Heck, every operating system should be written like that in my opinion. But, if something needs to run in the background, we, the users, should be allowed to approve it. Obviously there should be categories of apps that should also be allowed, such as taskers and multimedia. The rest should be an user approved process. It saves memory; it saves processing; it saves battery. Most importantly, it allows better performance for the task at hand.
Is it such a crazy idea?
So who is going to accuse me of being a fanboi iDiot?!?
Electrofreak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,080
I'm the team lead for a tech support team for the government. I use Android, and all but 1 person on my team uses Android.
Zumino Zufeilon
Gawd
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2004
- Messages
- 917
And the point wasn't that quite a few tech's use Android. Hell, techies are Android's target audience in a lot of ways.
The point was how many techies use iOS/iPhones. . .
I think it matters in the sense that you want a new phone to use some of the most powerful hardware available so it can have a more useful life. The iP4 was chastised for using only a SGX535, but the new Nexus isn't panned for using a SGX540?
Then again it didn't matter in the iPhone 4.
Electrofreak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,080
I'm going to keep echoing until you guys get this:
PS: SGX535 is a huge difference in performance per clock from an SGX540.
EDIT2 - I'm really not trying to come across as an Imagination Technologies fanboi here, because I'm not. I don't have any particular preference over GPU, CPU, or SoC for that matter, they all have their pros and cons. But I am trying to dispel this notion that the SGX540 in the Galaxy Nexus will perform anything like the SGX540 of yesteryear in the original Galaxy S line of phones.
And I'm going to keep echoing that there is much more powerful hardware available right now. It's funny how people fantasized about the Prime using a SGX543MP2, but now have to apologize for older tech.
Electrofreak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,080
Dude, there's no freakin' smartphone SoC on the market made by TI or Samsung (the only ones that use Imagination Technologies GPUs instead of their own) that have the SGX543MP2. Apple shoehorned it into the iPhone 4S but they're not using an ARM hardcopy SoC, and that gives them flexibility that other companies don't have.
If anyone was fantasizing about the Galaxy Nexus having an Imagination Technologies GPU that's not in any production TI or Samsung SoC, they had to have been high, or stupid.
Last edited:
It sounds like you admitted that Apple engineered something no other OEM has been able or willing to do. That's a funny statement coming from someone who likes to recommend phones on hardware specifications.
Apple didn't have to "shoehorn" anything. Apple has a history of reusing parts across multiple devices. It's called engineering.
Apple does very well on the engineering side of things, no denying that. However, there really isn't much use arguing over the Galaxy Nexus until we see some more hands on hardware reviews. The TI OMAP while old is being taken advantage of in ways previously unseen. If ICS is optimized for the OMAP there will be performance gains that much is certain. While the GN may not be able to play games at 720 in full 60fps glory it will be able to decode HD very well and with the higher overclocks and dual channel memory we're going to see some good stuff I'm willing to bet. I honestly can't see either Samsung or Google thinking releasing their premier flagship model using ICS on hardware from 2007 if it wasn't up to par.
Electrofreak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,080
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? I'll be happy to explain ARM licensing agreements if you don't understand.
havermeyer
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Nov 17, 2010
- Messages
- 254
I'd characterize it as out maneuvering. When the other ARM licensees (whose products end up in phones) went with single core GPUs for this generation's SoCs, Apple tossed a dual in there. Well played.
That being said, there's more to the OMAP 4460 SoC than the GPU. The inclusion of a TI audio codec (I hope it sounds good) instead of the (good) Wolfson or the (meh) Yamaha codec Samsung has used in the past seems to indicate a tight relationship with TI for the GN. The camera speed shows the Image Signal Processor was most certainly implemented quite well. And TI touts their programmable hardware video accelerator, too: http://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/b/mobile_m...ct-android-4-0-runs-on-the-omap-platform.aspx