Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 63 posts

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#11

Post by nicoburns »

scarface74 wrote: post #2

Even though the average Android phone doesn’t compare performance wise to an iOS device and really sucks when it comes to running complicated web apps, it’s mostly Android users here who claim that progressive web apps are the future and that Apple is holding them back.

That's because it's not performance that's holding back PWAs. With a bit of work, perf was good enough for web apps on an iPhone 4S or earlier. iPhone 4s was released in 2011, so if low-end android devices are not hitting 2012/2013 iPhone performance levels, then they're also good enough for PWAs.

It's the lack of platform APIs for things like offline storage and push notifications that are holding back web apps, not performance.

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#12

Post by ge96 »

nicoburns wrote: post #11
scarface74 wrote: post #2

Even though the average Android phone doesn’t compare performance wise to an iOS device and really sucks when it comes to running complicated web apps, it’s mostly Android users here who claim that progressive web apps are the future and that Apple is holding them back.

That's because it's not performance that's holding back PWAs. With a bit of work, perf was good enough for web apps on an iPhone 4S or earlier. iPhone 4s was released in 2011, so if low-end android devices are not hitting 2012/2013 iPhone performance levels, then they're also good enough for PWAs. It's the lack of platform APIs for things like offline storage and push notifications that are holding back web apps, not…

Yeah regarding no filesystem, not sure if it is dumb but I was using Dexie(IndexedDB wrapper,) to store images as base64 strings. It works but what can suck is the time to turn it back to an image to be displayed. Which using small thumbnails it's not bad but without pagination(seems obvious you should) but it's so much data it throws a chromium-level error so idk ... But was faster to reach MVP than RN for me with my skills. There was an offline-first requirement so that's why the images are stored that way but it has a remote REST API for sync and S3 for storing the large images.

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#14

Post by scarface74 »

nicoburns wrote: post #11
scarface74 wrote: post #2

Even though the average Android phone doesn’t compare performance wise to an iOS device and really sucks when it comes to running complicated web apps, it’s mostly Android users here who claim that progressive web apps are the future and that Apple is holding them back.

That's because it's not performance that's holding back PWAs. With a bit of work, perf was good enough for web apps on an iPhone 4S or earlier. iPhone 4s was released in 2011, so if low-end android devices are not hitting 2012/2013 iPhone performance levels, then they're also good enough for PWAs. It's the lack of platform APIs for things like offline storage and push notifications that are holding back web apps, not…

I bought my son a MotoG back in 2017. Because I kept reading that it was a good midrange Android phone. It was slow running “native” apps, web performance was even worse.

He was more than happy to “upgrade” to my iPhone 6s (2015) in 2018. Performance was noticeable better. Also, it is still supported by the latest version of iOS.

Of course by then the phone was three years old so I replaced the battery.

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#16

Post by arendtio »

scarface74 wrote: post #2

Even though the average Android phone doesn’t compare performance wise to an iOS device and really sucks when it comes to running complicated web apps, it’s mostly Android users here who claim that progressive web apps are the future and that Apple is holding them back.

I run my own PWA on a 2012 Samsung Galaxy S3 and the only performance problems I have, are due to bad decisions as a developer (e.g. loading all elements of a list isn't such a great idea when the list grows over time and you use the app for 3 years (so far)).

So if you are serious about building PWAs you shouldn't have performance issues. Yes, they are a bit slower than native apps, but with today's devices that shouldn't matter.

The issue with Apple is, however, that they don't support all the APIs you need to create an awesome PWA (and decided recently to throw away the localStorage every 7 days unless the user wants to clutter his desktop with every PWA that needs to store data on the device for longer periods).

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#17

Post by Jonnax »

This is essentially Qualcomm vs Apple in the mobile market.

But the question I've got from looking at the the Geekbench site:

iPhone 11: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611448

AMD 3900x 12 Zen 2 12 Core: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611445

The iPhone has higher single core performance than a desktop CPU with a 105W TDP.

Of course it has more cores. But am I missing something here?

Is this test actually representative of device performance?

Or are certain desktop features not tested?

Does the whole RISC Vs CISC of X86 and ARM make a difference?

Assuming core count was equal. Would a desktop CPU and an Apple SoC run at equivalent performance if it was running Ubuntu and running native compiled code?

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#18

Post by The_rationalist »

Jonnax wrote: post #17

This is essentially Qualcomm vs Apple in the mobile market. But the question I've got from looking at the the Geekbench site: iPhone 11: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611448 AMD 3900x 12 Zen 2 12 Core: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1611445 The iPhone has higher single core performance than a desktop CPU with a 105W TDP. Of course it has more cores. But am I missing something here? Is this test actually…

Geekbench is a flawed benchmarck that discriminate x86, at least that's what I read on the AMD subreddit a year ago.

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#19

Post by Jonnax »

huffmsa wrote: post #3

What do you iPhone users do with all of your power?

The other question to ask is why do some consumers want less for their money?

Apple is making luxury goods, they're not going to drop their prices.

It's like how there's recently been a bunch of articles about how phones are getting "too much" RAM and the comparison is laptops.

When the question should really be, why do laptop manufacturers get away with putting 4 or 8gb of RAM in a laptop and mobile phones are catching up.

And anyway. What most people do is use their devices however they want with the expectation that everything runs smooth, they can multitask and the demands of higher quality video/pictures/refresh rates can be met.

Of course there are people that are satisfied with yesterday's technology. Plenty of people use 10 year old ThinkPads and get their work and entertainment done. Same with getting a £100 smart phone.

Re: Mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap

#20

Post by Symmetry »

altmind wrote: post #5

geekbench have unreliable perfromance stats that've been favoring iphone for a looong while. check your conclusions - 90% of articles with rocking iphone performance cite geekbench.

There was a version of Geekbench a while ago for which you could make a good argument for that but Geekbench 5 seems to tell the same story that Spec, web tests, etc all tell. Apple's cores really do seem to be that good though they benefit from running at the clock speed they were designed for, unlike an Intel U-series which has more pipeline stages than it needs to hit its clock.

And Apple also benefits from being able to set their own page size and probably from getting to have caches that are virtually indexed and physically tagged rather then physically indexed and physically tagged. Doing address translation in parallel with way lookup is a nice little performance boost. There are rumors of other cleverness in the cache heirarchy from control of the OS but I don't know the details.

Post reply on HN