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October Nexus Prime rumors
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Electrofreak
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Tasers? Bah, there's apps for that.
Silentbob343
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I don't.
It's an OK OS, but the updates have not improved performance or looks by that much and I don't think ICS will blow me away. I played with a honeycomb tablet, two actually, and the lag and stuttering when using it for the first 15-20 seconds was terrible. It was like watching a slide show, why is performance terrible on dual core tablets... Unless ICS has made some really big improvements I will pass.
What lag are you talking about? I own a Xoom, have yet to encounter any lag on this thing.....
jeremyshaw
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I have a TF101(Revolver and stock 3.2.1), Nook Color (CM7nightlies), and an iPad 2. I know what lag he is talking about, lol. If you don't notice or care for it... good for you.
http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/4103/dsc0430n.jpg <-- somewhat unrelated photo I took for someone who was looking for an ebook reader.
Anybody know how fast new phone releases drop in price? the only reason I ask is because I'm eligible for an upgrade in the middle of December. I'm currently using a Droid Eris with a huge deadspot in the screen, so that date can't come fast enough. Really my question is, do you think we'll see a price drop at all before then? Do Google phones usually keep higher prices longer?
Don't taze me, bro!
Don't taze me, bro!
I have a TF101(Revolver and stock 3.2.1), Nook Color (CM7nightlies), and an iPad 2. I know what lag he is talking about, lol. If you don't notice or care for it... good for you.
Gingerbread sucks on tablets, so your Nook Color running CM7 is irrelevant. Honeycomb on a Tegra 2 isn't as smooth as an iPad 2, no, but it does not at all lag and stutter like that other guy was talking about. iPad 2 also has a faster CPU and a ridiculously faster GPU, which helps it a ton.
Electrofreak
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Actually, the primary defining factor is that the UI on the iPad is hardware accelerated, whereas in Android it is not. It's been indicated that this may change in Ice Cream Sandwich.
jhinck1414
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can't wait till Tuesday for the announcement
After denying that a GPU accelerated UI is necessary for years lets see what they can do.
jhinck1414
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I am sure they will make it right.
Electrofreak
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I don't think I ever saw Google say that. Source?
jeremyshaw
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"Gingerbread sucks on tablets," lol. About as accurate as saying the iPad 2 has a "ridiculously faster GPU," (ignoreing most benchmarks run at the iPad 2's lower resolution - 1024x768 - vs the typical Tegra 2 tablet (at the time when most comparisions were made, like Anandtech's) 1280x800.
Electrofreak
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As much as it pains me to admit it, the PowerVR SGX543MP2 in the iPad 2 is an absolute beast, and can easily be classified as a "ridiculously faster GPU" than what is in the current Android tablets (NVIDIA ULP GeForce, PowerVR SGX540, Adreno 205).
What are the chances t-mobile will carry this phone by the end of the year? I was looking at the HTC Amaze but the poor battery life shot that idea down. Not that impressed with the SGS II either. My luck, I'll wait out the Nexus Prime and the battery life will turn out to be crap - I can't stand a phone with poor battery life.
jhinck1414
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We really won't get a great idea about battery life till it is out for a few days. We don't know how well the os plays with the battery.
jeremyshaw
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Ah, I see. Looking at specs alone, it's about 8x more powerful than the Tegra 2 - assuming the Tegra 2 get's a clear mix of 50% Vertex, 50% Pixel
Otherwise, the figure get's higher.EDIT: damn, does that mean the iPhone 4S is faster than the Galaxy SII in GPU!? (CPU, unless if A5 is missing NEON MPE or something crazy, should be able to at least remotely keep up).
He works for Google. Read on...
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914
I would have probably switched to an Android phone a long time ago, but their attitude is ridiculous. Apple had a huge head start in this area due to OS X, but so what, that doesn't mean you can't catch up.
He states that it's something they've looked at and blah, blah, blah. Yes, it's not an easy problem to solve. Samsung did it to differentiate themselves from the competition (good for them), but this needs to come from Google.
I remember when OS X debuted and the UI was not accelerated by the GPU. Slow and laggy unless you had a fast CPU.
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Ah, I see. Looking at specs alone, it's about 8x more powerful than the Tegra 2 - assuming the Tegra 2 get's a clear mix of 50% Vertex, 50% Pixel
EDIT: damn, does that mean the iPhone 4S is faster than the Galaxy SII in GPU!? (CPU, unless if A5 is missing NEON MPE or something crazy, should be able to at least remotely keep up).
Yes it's faster.
Why don't more devices use that GPU? And the iPad2 isn't exactly new anymore. Every high end phone needs to use something similar or better. It's not just beating the competition. It's a beat down.
jeremyshaw
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I just found out, not only is there a MP2 (variant the iPad 2 is using), there is a MP4!! Twice as fast!
Well, at least twice as many execution resources...EDIT: yup, also found out the Mali 400 on the Galaxy SII is faster than Tegra 2. Oh, well. Hopefully 28nm brings some goodness for Kal El+
EDIT2: Oh, well. Looks like TI's OMAP+SGX540 combo rumored to be used in the Nexus Prime isn't going to be faster than the Tegra 2 (in graphics, CPU, the NEON-MPE should make a difference for floating point and multimedia based workloads). At least there is a chance in hell my ol' Atrix will get ICS
enough off topic from me in this direction. EDIT3: crap, I'm wrong, the one rumored to be in the Nexus Prime is clocked way higher
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Electrofreak
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Ah, I see. Looking at specs alone, it's about 8x more powerful than the Tegra 2 - assuming the Tegra 2 get's a clear mix of 50% Vertex, 50% Pixel
EDIT: damn, does that mean the iPhone 4S is faster than the Galaxy SII in GPU!? (CPU, unless if A5 is missing NEON MPE or something crazy, should be able to at least remotely keep up).
Well, the Galaxy S2 runs a pretty beastly Mali-400 GPU in its own right, but yes, the iPhone 4S has the SGX543MP2 as well, though it's downclocked.
AnandTech did a pretty good review on it: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4951/...rks-800mhz-a5-slightly-slower-gpu-than-ipad-2
I think the reason behind it all is that Apple has the UI accelerated by the GPU, so it makes sense to invest in a good GPU as it's used nearly constantly. They can then downclock the CPU a little bit for battery efficiency and get away with it.
Until Android does the same thing, the focus will be on a powerful CPU to keep things smooth, the GPU is basically just there for games. I hope this trend will change.
I just found out, not only is there a MP2 (variant the iPad 2 is using), there is a MP4!! Twice as fast!
EDIT: yup, also found out the Mali 400 on the Galaxy SII is faster than Tegra 2. Oh, well. Hopefully 28nm brings some goodness for Kal El+
EDIT2: Oh, well. Looks like TI's OMAP+SGX540 combo rumored to be used in the Nexus Prime isn't going to be faster than the Tegra 2 (in graphics, CPU, the NEON-MPE should make a difference for floating point and multimedia based workloads). At least there is a chance in hell my ol' Atrix will get ICS
EDIT3: crap, I'm wrong, the one rumored to be in the Nexus Prime is clocked way higher
Mali-400 is pretty sweet. Awesome pixel fill rate, though polygon performance takes a hit.
And yes, the good 'ol SGX540 in the OMAP4 series is overclocked like crazy. It might not be the dual-core SGX543MP2, or the quad-core SGX543MP4, but it's still pretty good, particularly when it's running at a high enough clock speed. Factor in performance enhancements due to the dual-channel (Tegra 2 is single-channel) LPDDR2 memory controllers (remember, the GPU in an SoC shares the RAM with the CPU), and we should see it perform well. However we'll have to wait to see if it holds its own against the SGX543MP2... it basically would have to be clocked more than twice as high as that GPU to compare.
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Totenblume
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The SGX540 in the TI 4460 isn't much of an improvement over Mali-400 (if any), and I'm pretty sure the latter is superior in per-clock. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Though I'm still not buying the fact that it has an OMAP4 inside. Aside from the LTE support, I don't see how that is anything but a step backwards over the Exynos equivalent.
Found this article with original link here.
- Exynos 4212 is still using Mali T400 but with clock bump from 266MHz to 460MHz (matching the ~50% graphics performance increase rumors)
- Exynos 5250 will use the Mali T604 with A15 cpu, both of which were announced Nov 2010 (Samsung was the first to license; this was also when the SGS II design got finalized)
I originally guessed it would be 4212 with T604 but I guess that gpu really needs to be paired with the A15 (something called CoreLink). If the Samsung Galaxy S3 ships with the Exynos 5250 in 1H2012, Samsung will pretty much destroy every other OEM in performance. And because its DirectX and OpenGL compliant I don't think they'll wait until 2013 to start shipping because Windows 8 is going to release before then.
Either way, while it looks like the Nexus Prime will be *the* phone to have (and one I plan to buy), the next flagship Nexus or Galaxy phone will probably have the performance to actually drive 720p in quality 3D.
Found this article with original link here.
- Exynos 4212 is still using Mali T400 but with clock bump from 266MHz to 460MHz (matching the ~50% graphics performance increase rumors)
- Exynos 5250 will use the Mali T604 with A15 cpu, both of which were announced Nov 2010 (Samsung was the first to license; this was also when the SGS II design got finalized)
I originally guessed it would be 4212 with T604 but I guess that gpu really needs to be paired with the A15 (something called CoreLink). If the Samsung Galaxy S3 ships with the Exynos 5250 in 1H2012, Samsung will pretty much destroy every other OEM in performance. And because its DirectX and OpenGL compliant I don't think they'll wait until 2013 to start shipping because Windows 8 is going to release before then.
Either way, while it looks like the Nexus Prime will be *the* phone to have (and one I plan to buy), the next flagship Nexus or Galaxy phone will probably have the performance to actually drive 720p in quality 3D.
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jeremyshaw
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Okay, I know I said, "last time," but whatever...
nVidia did claim they could get away with a single channel due to "nVidia's experience with building GPUs," which I am inclined to believe. Though only clocked at 300 (phones) MHz vs the 300MHz+ dual channel on some SoC, makes this kinda hard to believe...
On the other hand, I also found out the SGX543MP2 has mostly a tile based chip, too (sort of like the dead Microsoft Tailsman project), so it shouldn't need nearly as much memory bandwidth for some games.
We'll just have to wait an see which chip Google will endow their magic upon, lol. Whichever one it is, will likely sell rather well for the next year or so (if Tegra 2/Honeycomb is any indicator for recent events).
nVidia did claim they could get away with a single channel due to "nVidia's experience with building GPUs," which I am inclined to believe. Though only clocked at 300 (phones) MHz vs the 300MHz+ dual channel on some SoC, makes this kinda hard to believe...
On the other hand, I also found out the SGX543MP2 has mostly a tile based chip, too (sort of like the dead Microsoft Tailsman project), so it shouldn't need nearly as much memory bandwidth for some games.
We'll just have to wait an see which chip Google will endow their magic upon, lol. Whichever one it is, will likely sell rather well for the next year or so (if Tegra 2/Honeycomb is any indicator for recent events).
Electrofreak
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I didn't think so either originally but if you think about it, Google is just moving from one major SoC to the other to try to optimize Android across all of the hardware options.
Think about it: Nexus One was a Qualcomm SoC. Nexus S a Samsung SoC. Nexus Prime stands to reason to be either a TI or an NVIDIA SoC, and given all of the TI references showing up in ICS development materials, a TI chip makes sense. I thought I'd see it in a Motorola shell, but perhaps that didn't happen because Google was planning on buying Motorola Mobility and didn't want to look like it's playing favorites.
This would mean almost certainly that the next Google Phone would be an NVIDIA SoC, followed by Qualcomm again shortly thereafter. And at some point maybe we'll even see Intel thrown into the mix, given Google's collaboration with them. I still think Intel has a long way to go before it reaches ARM's power efficiency, but who knows!
Nvidia lied - they don't know shit about building ARM chips. Tegra 1 was terribad, Tegra 2 was mediocre at best and screwed up some very basic stuff (no NEON support? wtf?), and neither has remotely enough memory bandwidth which so far only Apple seems to have actually figured out.
Honeycomb is hardware accelerated. Android already has it.
I do believe you've come to realize just how right I was
Really? You completely don't understand what romainguy said, do you? Also, for fuck's sake, Android is already hardware accelerated. It was added in Honeycomb, as the bug you linked to says. Here is a giant talk about it by romainguy at Google I/O:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9S5EO7CLjo
Yeah, honeycomb, the same OS that current smart phone AREN'T using, right? When was honeycomb released? What OS is the Galaxy S II shipping with?
Face it, Google fucked up royally by not including hardware acceleration from the start. They can blame garbage collection and other shit all they want it won't change the fact that they fucked up. 2011 and sites are still benchmarking scrolling performance...MUHAHAHAHA
jeremyshaw
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I think it has more to do with Android HW diversity. I mean, some tablets like the Galaxy Tab 8.9 don't even have an useable OpenGL ES driver... So HW accell is harder on android, I'd guess?
But overall, the video linked above ya does a good job of explaining why: Google's reference platform. The nice and clean reference platform, had little issue without HW accell in the past. But even CM7 isn't the clean reference platform. Only on the Xoom and Tegra 2's limited bandwidth did there become a prioblem, so GPU rendering became a necessity.
As for the other comment, I'd guess nVidia thought they could get away with their desktop chipset and IGP experience, but of course, they fired their chipset team, lol...
Tegra 1 failed not on the HW side, but how nVidia treated the product: as a desktop GPU. Put it on the shelves, and it should sell... right? Wrong,
.So are you one of those people that thinks Google internally forked Android? Hint, they aren't going to remove something they already shipped - that makes no sense. The work is done - Android has hardware acceleration. It doesn't have it on phones yet, no, but it's not like tablets run an entirely different architecture. It's the same shit to the system, just different resolutions.
And FYI, the Galaxy S II is only new in the states - it shipped the same month the Xoom and Honeycomb did. It's also running the newest version of Android for phones - Gingerbread 2.3.5
They didn't fuck up at all - they did what they had to to get to market. As a result, Android is leading the pack, with iOS pulling a somewhat close second. Yet we can see just how expensive being late is - look at WP7 and it's complete lack of marketshare whatsoever. Time is *incredibly* important in consumer electronics.
Of course, the simple fact is that most people don't really give a shit about 30fps vs. 60fps. It's a fun rant by fans, but most users really truly don't care that much. This isn't anything new, people put up with tons of shit slowing down their computers a ton. They put up with slow browser, lots of toolbars, AV scans, etc... Buttery smooth UI is awesome, absolutely, but it is *far* from critical. Gingerbread isn't buttery smooth to scroll, but it is also not at all the lagfest some people (such as yourself) want it to be. Gingerbread on a Nexus S or Galaxy SII is quite fast, responsive, and can scroll just fine.
jeremyshaw
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^^ now that is opinion, lol.
Which part? The part about smooth UIs or the part about ICS & hardware acceleration? The former is more subjective analysis of raw facts and data. You can argue my interpretation, but you better back it up. If the latter, that's just common sense. Anyone who thinks ICS won't have HW acceleration must demonstrate a damn good reason why - which nobody can.
jeremyshaw
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Android is always going to have some lag. There are 2 types of lag experienced today -
1. lack of HW acceleration in the framework - this is better in HC and hopefully 100% of the OS will use the gpu in ICS, but it remains to be seen. But Google never made having HA a priority, they just ignore the hardware issues. There is simply no excuse why Fryo/GB, hell even Eclair, did not include a gpu rendering path in the OS, which would be used for phones which had a capable gpu - this is software design 101 which any graphics programmer knows. Google just didn't consider this important, and waited till HC. Their philosophy is same as the one they use in their data centers - lets throw more processing power at it.
2. Multitasking - iOS and WP7 only allow certain apps (like music) to run int he background. Everything else gets tombstoned the moment you switch. Android is true multitasking and the OS will only suspend an app if memory is low. This means depending on the backround app, you can always experience lag. Just like on the most powerful desktop with 16GB ram, you can still get lag. There is simply no fix for this.
Would I sacrifice #2 for increased response time in all situations. Absolutely not! Its the beauty of Android that I can do 10 things at once, or choose not to. And there are scripts floating around that will change your memory settings (such as V6 supercharger), scheduler etc which can make it smoother.
I should add a 3rd source of lag - bloody Java garbage collection. This is also never going to go away. The reality is native code is always going to perform faster, and much more important, more predictably, than a virtual machine, which is what Android uses.
1. lack of HW acceleration in the framework - this is better in HC and hopefully 100% of the OS will use the gpu in ICS, but it remains to be seen. But Google never made having HA a priority, they just ignore the hardware issues. There is simply no excuse why Fryo/GB, hell even Eclair, did not include a gpu rendering path in the OS, which would be used for phones which had a capable gpu - this is software design 101 which any graphics programmer knows. Google just didn't consider this important, and waited till HC. Their philosophy is same as the one they use in their data centers - lets throw more processing power at it.
2. Multitasking - iOS and WP7 only allow certain apps (like music) to run int he background. Everything else gets tombstoned the moment you switch. Android is true multitasking and the OS will only suspend an app if memory is low. This means depending on the backround app, you can always experience lag. Just like on the most powerful desktop with 16GB ram, you can still get lag. There is simply no fix for this.
Would I sacrifice #2 for increased response time in all situations. Absolutely not! Its the beauty of Android that I can do 10 things at once, or choose not to. And there are scripts floating around that will change your memory settings (such as V6 supercharger), scheduler etc which can make it smoother.
I should add a 3rd source of lag - bloody Java garbage collection. This is also never going to go away. The reality is native code is always going to perform faster, and much more important, more predictably, than a virtual machine, which is what Android uses.
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Queue Steve Jobs' rant about people not wanting their phone acting like a PC. Maybe YOU will put up with that.
Oh yeah
4" 400x240 TN panel
Single core 600MHz Cortex 8
128MB ram
2GB on board memory with no expansion
2-axis accelerometer
1000 grams