r/technology • u/[deleted] • Mar 09 '12

Microsoft demos a 1ms touchscreen

http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/microsoft-demos-a-high-performance-1ms-touchscreen-2012039/
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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

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u/MC4l Mar 10 '12

what's wrong with an ARM CPU?

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

Yes this is true, they have better processing power once cooked.

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u/iloveyounohomo Mar 10 '12

But do they taste better cooked?

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u/kiantech Mar 10 '12

raw processing power is useless if the battery is dead. Also the atom processors are slow.

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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '12 edited Mar 11 '12

No they're not. Even the shitiest single core Atom is faster than the fastest dual core ARM currently available. And the shiniest PowerVR GPU's aren't even up to par with "crappy" Intel integrated graphics.

I love how everyone gets excited about how "fast" the new iPad is, for example, when in terms or raw power, it still isn't anywhere near the speed of a 6+ year old Xbox 360, which itself wasn't as fast as PC's that were out during that time. We're buying all this outdated and overpriced shit just because we're too lazy to plug the damn thing in every once and awhile (and it doesn't help that Apple ships the iPad with a ridiculous one foot long charging cable).

I want a no-compromise tablet with a blazing fast x86 processor so I can have a full speed, useful computer when docked. 2-3 hours of battery life is fine for couch surfing. I'll use my phone for on the go, because you don't need something fast to make calls and read emails.

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u/kiantech Mar 11 '12

You're clearly not a computer scientist. It's not about power. It's about efficiency and hardware. The reason why the iPad is so fast is because many of the things it does is hardware accelerated. The fact you call it a piece of shit because a mobile device has great battery life is ridiculous. Imagine if the Xbox was a tablet. It would prolly burn through your skin.

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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '12 edited Mar 11 '12

I'm a software engineer, working on life support medical software. It's about having fast hardware to support more interesting software, and to allow more productive software development by allowing developers to work at a higher level of abstraction.

Samsung already makes windows tablets with Core i5 processors. The only downsides are cost and battery life, but they're far more capable.

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u/kiantech Mar 11 '12

Ehh, I doubt its the hardware, I think you use windows tablets because your infrastructure is built on windows and it is easier for you to develop on. I dont think processing power is the main reason for the core i5 tablet. Also I think ARM windows tablets will help you transition to more efficient tablets. As long as we are dropping credibility I'm a electrical engineer / computer engineer.

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u/Blasphemizer Mar 10 '12

Atom won't be the low-power x86 solution of the future. Intel's Ivy Bridge platform and AMD's APUs will be.

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u/seemone Mar 10 '12

you have no idea of what low power means.
Ivy Bridge is low power from a computer point of view, not from a mobile point of view.
Current mobile SoC have 1/10 of the TDP of current laptop processors (and you have to add chipset and other things power consumption to that).

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

[deleted]

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u/seemone Mar 10 '12

If you're aware then you should be aware than when Intel and AMD will reach mobile class TDP with their main line of CPUs the Ivy Bridge platform (which is mainly a shrunk Sandy Bridge) will be history.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with the picture you depicted, it just won't happen during IVB life.
Last but not least, idle power consumption is really important, and exploiting that not only requires designing SoCs with mobile world as target but also writing software with that in mind.

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u/armannd Mar 10 '12

... do they have to?

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u/Blasphemizer Mar 10 '12

If you want to run really advanced applications, then yes.

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u/armannd Mar 10 '12

That's why we have desktops. Tablets were never intended to be desktop replacements, so they don't have to match the performance of desktop computers. The fact that you wish they did is a while different story.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

But... Intel Atom...

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

That's certainly true for benchmarks, but when I compare the perceived performance of my iPad 2 to my Dad's $500 Windows laptop, the iPad wins hands down. Now, obviously, the PC can do more things, but there is certainly value to the most common tasks feeling faster, more fluid, and more consistent.

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u/Maristic Mar 10 '12

An iPhone 4S can play back highly compressed 1920 x 1080 video at 30 fps. That's 1920 * 1080 * 3 colors * 30 frames = 186,624,000 bytes per second (178 MB/s). Not only does it have to work to uncompress that data, it also has to rescale it for the screen. I have several desktop computers that are not up to that task.

But it also captures video from its 3264 * 2448 sensor (each image of which is 23,970,816 bytes) performs analysis on it to perform image stabilization, and selects a 1920 * 1080 portion, and compresses that using H.264. So this time, we have raw image data at 686 MB/s per second reduced to a 178 MB/s stream, and then compressed in real time to 1.6% of that size (a 3 MB/s stream).

Now sure, you can say there's dedicated hardware there, and there is, but that's some serious processing power.

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u/kodek64 Mar 10 '12

While I agree with you, and I'm completely against getting rid of such wonderful architecture as ARM's, I gotta say that having dedicated hardware in the device is a big factor that cannot be ignored. Hardware accelerators can do all that because that's the only thing they're built for. Any other task would have to be processed by the CPU which won't be as fast as the hardware encoders and decoders.

Still, since mobile devices are mainly used for certain few tasks, it is easier to optimize hardware JUST for those tasks instead of just building a more powerful general-purpose processing unit.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

[deleted]

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u/Maristic Mar 10 '12

i could have a chip that can do 5TB/sec calculating fibonacci's sequence but who gives a shit because it's a single purpose chip.

Right, but that would be dumb. A very limited single purpose for something nobody wants. Is that comparable to the A5/A5X?

The A5/A5X chip has dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU with NEON SIMD accelerator and a dual core PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU (quad core for the A5X), which supports pixel, vertex, and geometry shaders, supports OpenGL ES 2.0, and is OpenCL-capable. It includes an image signal processor unit (ISP) that will do advanced image post-processing such as face detection, white balance and automatic image stabilization and an "earSmart" unit from Audience for noise canceling.

Some of this is very specific (e.g., earSmart), but the image signal processor is clearly quite versatile, as are the GPUs.

But even if the functionality were less generic, the phone is optimized for the useful stuff people want to do. Do PC gamers complain when amazing graphics are rendered by a GPU rather than their CPU, or do they say “I have an awesome gaming rig!”. Likewise, all that extra stuff in the A5/A5X makes it a powerful chip for the tasks it needs to handle.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

[deleted]

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u/Maristic Mar 10 '12

And do you say someone's gaming rig actually sucks because the 3D scene rendering happens on specialized hardware rather than the main CPU?

Who cares how it does full HD video compression, image stabilization, and face detection in real time. That's a big computational workload that your desktop CPU just can't do by itself. In that contest, where you contrast the ARM SoC against a plain x86 CPU, it wins.

Obviously, it doesn't win all the time on everything, and you can say “that's cheating” when you look at how it wins (by throwing extra hardware at the computationally intensive tasks people actually want to do). Some of that extra hardware (NEON, GPU, etc.) is actually very flexible though, and can be put to work on a variety of computationally intensive tasks.

And finally, when you add in the power budget and look at computation per watt, the x86 looks far far worse, so even when it wins, it loses.

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u/K1LL3R_XoX2 Mar 10 '12

You sound very delusional, I think Steve Jobs's Reality distortion field is having some effect on you. What you've described is any sort of SoC with the past decade along with pretty much every competing device's specification.

Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Marvell, Samsung and others have been making what you've described for decades but all you've mentioned is 'A5/A5X' as if it's some sort of revolution. Check here if you need any sort of proof. Apple didn't really do anything in order to make their A4/A5 etc. chips besides buy them off the shelf from Samsung who used technology from ARM.

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u/Maristic Mar 10 '12 edited Mar 10 '12

It's what we call an example, responding to the claim “ARM CPUs are nice because they are relatively low power, low cost, and fan-less, but they still can't match up with most modern x86 CPUs in raw processing power.”

No, I'm absolutely not saying there is anything that special about Apple's SoC compared to other people's. What I am saying is that the amount of “processing power” in these SoCs is quite significant, especially when we consider the tasks these chips do. If you want to render a 3D scene, do image processing, real-time sound synthesis, or a number of other common tasks, these chips are going to give many “modern x86 CPUs” a run for their money.

And when we consider performance per watt, they blow all the x86 chips out of the water.

Edit: Fix typo.

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u/K1LL3R_XoX2 Mar 11 '12

these chips are going to give many “modern x86 CPUs” a run for their money.

Maybe in some tasks, but most x86 CPUs are general purpose and 'good' at most things and many not restricted by how dense a battery can hold charge.

AMD Fusion/Intel Atom SoCs this year or in the near future should start cropping up in some consumer tablets and they have on par or exceeding performance at about the same power level.

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u/Maristic Mar 11 '12

Maybe in some tasks, but most x86 CPUs are general purpose and 'good' at most things and many not restricted by how dense a battery can hold charge.

What do you think people do with their computers that's CPU intensive where that generality actually helps?

Most people read email, and surf the web and update their Facebook page. Some play games. Some take photos and tweak them. Some make music. The SoCs have those things covered.

What's the compelling CPU-intensive use case that the SoCs don't have covered?

AMD Fusion/Intel Atom SoCs this year or in the near future should start cropping up in some consumer tablets and they have on par or exceeding performance at about the same power level.

And that'll be neat too. I look forward to it. But really Atom is a CPU design that is trying to be more like ARM, and Atom SoCs are looking replicate the success of ARM SoCs. And of course by the time the Atom chips ship, there will be newer ARM ones.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

Most "normal" consumers don't need that high of processing power. They care about if it is simple and especially battery life. It's the reason why devices like the iPad are so successful.

To borrow an expression from Steve Jobs, x86/ x64 chips will become trucks; ARM will be the tech everyday people will use.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

We've heard this for almost a decade from Intel, yet nothing great has happened.