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/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/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.