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Google Nexus 5x and 6P

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Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings." non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers. There reason why is pret…

You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question. An…

No, you don't.

Encoding a video should not be CPU, so let's get that out of there. Most of the rest is more GPU dependent than CPU dependent. The amount of CPU time you should be spending on these tasks is really low.

For example, web browsing and reading, the CPU should be asleep most of the time.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of very silly little tasks for A53's to do, but what you listed are not those tasks.

It's more things like "syncing" or something that is a poll loop and event bound, not something that is in any way CPU bound. Period. CPU bound stuff is not something for the A53's in this to tackle. It makes battery life worse. That is what the actual, in-the-field data says.

" a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57"

Truthfully, for most A53 cores, this is true only in the dreams of the chip designers.

"but it is a very good bet for most real world usage."

Then what, pray tell, do you expect the A57's to be doing in this world?

And why, in practice, has big.little and other things not shown any better battery life at all if it's really a better way of doing things.

I have no doubt it may be a better way of doing things in the future, but it ain't right now ;)

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings." non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers. There reason why is pret…

You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question. An…

CPUs enter and exit sleep on Android devices constantly. Back in 2007 on the MSM7201A we'd go to power-down sleep for any idle times of >50mS (nothing to schedule for the next 50mS). Run fast and go to sleep has always been the primary power policy.

That said there's plenty of lightweight threads and processes that are mostly IO or event bound, do very little compute, and will run in roughly the same time on a small core as a large core, but the small cores have a lower static power footprint (base cost to have them powered up at all), so big.little works out well there.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#343

Why did Google bother with all of that work to fix SD storage in Android M[0] if they're still not going to put an SD card in their Nexus phones!?! I was holding out hope that I would finally have a reason to buy a Nexus phone with the 5X or 6P, but now that we have the final spec sheet, I think I'm going to just grab an HTC One M9 or something. The lack of expandable storage really kills it for me. [0] http://www.an…

They did the work for third parties to keep it an an option for the lower end market. The higher end market has shown it doesn't care about SD cards and, honestly, I think for good reason: their user experience has always been terrible. Internal storage is faster and more reliable so I think you're always going to see more and more phones, especially flagships, not offer expandable options.

"their user experience has always been terrible."

What's so terrible about the user experience? I put in an SD card, my phone has more storage space, and I don't think about it any more. Seems like a pretty perfect user experience.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#344
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what's coming next. 240Hz refresh rates? Don't give Samsung new ideas for spec boasting.

I'd be more than fine with investments into high refresh rate screens, a true 240Hz desktop monitor wouldn't be spec boasting it would be the dream.

We aren't discussing desktop monitors, but mobile screens and the sanity of putting "moar pixels and them refresh rates" in it.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#345
post #329

As an owner of Nexus 5 I must say I'm a bit disappointed with this announcement. I was looking forwards to upgrading my almost two year old phone to Nexus 5x, but there doesn't seem to be a good reason unless Nexus 5 stops getting new Android updates. They have the same resolution, same amount of memory, same amount of storage. I don't shoot video, and I probably won't use fingerprint reader - but I do use wireless c…

you are everything that is wrong with the world. be glad your two year phone still feels like current gen. keep your money. don't throw away a product that is full of heavy metals (yeah you won't throw away, but sell. but the person buying will throw his old one away. so it's the same) but no, let's instead complain i can't consume blindly and constantly. sigh.

Why are you mad at a person who has rationally evaluated whether or not to upgrade an important productivity enhancing device (and who had decided not to upgrade) rather than the millions of uninformed people who just upgrade to have the newest and shiniest model?

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#346
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Plus the fingerprint thing is probably a bigger deal than you think Am I the only person on the planet who doesn't want a fingerprint reader on my phone? I don't want to secure anything of importance with my fingerprint - fingerprints are usernames, not passwords. This just feels like the equivalent of writing your password on a Post-It and sticking it to your monitor.

Nobody's going to bother to recreate your fingerprint, when it's much easier to beat you with a wrench ( https://xkcd.com/538/ ) until they get access to your phone. It's a huge convenience for you though, to unlock it without doing anything extra, as you're pressing that button anyway to turn the screen on. Much easier than typing passwords.

Many countries now take fingerprint scans when you cross the border. Even if they themselves never use it, its easily conceivable that they could be hacked or leaked. Then what? You can't revoke your fingerprint.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#347
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Plus the fingerprint thing is probably a bigger deal than you think Am I the only person on the planet who doesn't want a fingerprint reader on my phone? I don't want to secure anything of importance with my fingerprint - fingerprints are usernames, not passwords. This just feels like the equivalent of writing your password on a Post-It and sticking it to your monitor.

Nobody's going to bother to recreate your fingerprint, when it's much easier to beat you with a wrench ( https://xkcd.com/538/ ) until they get access to your phone. It's a huge convenience for you though, to unlock it without doing anything extra, as you're pressing that button anyway to turn the screen on. Much easier than typing passwords.

"Nobody's going to bother to recreate your fingerprint, when it's much easier to beat you with a wrench ( https://xkcd.com/538/ ) until they get access to your phone."

I think this misses the point. Accessing a device using a "cloned finger" (not tremendously difficult) can be done without the target ever knowing it has happened.

The wrench technique, less so.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings." non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers. There reason why is pret…

You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question. An…

"frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question"

Modern CPUs have many different levels of "going to sleep" and many of them can be switched in and out of very quickly.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#349
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did the work for third parties to keep it an an option for the lower end market. The higher end market has shown it doesn't care about SD cards and, honestly, I think for good reason: their user experience has always been terrible. Internal storage is faster and more reliable so I think you're always going to see more and more phones, especially flagships, not offer expandable options.

"their user experience has always been terrible." What's so terrible about the user experience? I put in an SD card, my phone has more storage space, and I don't think about it any more. Seems like a pretty perfect user experience.

It doesn't work like that, unfortunately. You can't use your SD as extensions of your device storage capacity, it can store just "your" files (as photos, musics, videos etc). You still need device capacity to install apps and apps use device to store things like cache.

You can move some of that to SD, but not everything. You'll end up with zero phone capacity and a pretty empty SD.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#350
On Nexus 4, this is disappointing.

Nexus 6 is too big.

Finger print is not a big deal. They steal your finger print you can't exactly change it. I also get cuts from my fingers when I work out so bandaid and all that would suck badly if I need to verify via fingerprint.

SD card is something I really want not the cloud. Not everybody got unlimited data or even good signal.

There are tons of people that takes pictures, videos and selfies that would like to have a large memory (sd enable this).

All they had to do was a good camera, good battery, fast charge and sd card. The screen could be amoled for bonus.

I have to skip this phone now. Waiting to see black berry priv.

Moto X pure is seems good but their parent company Lenovo got caught with spyware on mobile and laptop (thinkpad included). That's very sketchy.

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