Exclusive: Google Pixel 9 processor won't be the ambitious chip we hoped for
Exclusive: Google Pixel 9 processor won't be the ambitious chip we hoped for
The Tensor G4 will be a more minor upgrade than initially expected, but Google's chipset plans still offer plenty to look forward to.
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I've been running a galaxy S9 for years and have never run into a bottleneck with it.
Why do y'all keep needing more and more power packed into your phones? It doesn't make any sense to me.
"Why do you guys simply believe things should get better?"
That is how I read this. More power, more efficiency, better tech is not a bad thing to want.
Just because you want to hold on to a 5 year old phone doesn't mean someone else doesn't at least want to see efficiency in our pockets get better for the value we spend on them.
Imagine if someone said, I have dial up internet. Why are you guys constantly wanting faster Internet speeds.
It's okay to want things to get better. You should not have the mentality of, "it's just good enough."
How is this better value? I have a S9+, still full day battery and runs everything.
How is buying a new phone 'value'. What value does this bring exactly? You bring up dialup as a compassion. Well, modern connections don't tie up the phone line and are magnitudes faster (my Internet is 17,857x faster than dialup).
What tangible thing has been added to Mobile phones in the last 5 years? 10 years? What real value. Pretty sure my phone has more features than any 'modern' new phone.
The big reason is that you're choosing to spend several hundred dollars to put your still perfectly performant phone in a land fill so you can have a percentage or two more performance.
Your dial up comparison is not really a fair comparison, either. The S9 is not dialup in comparison to Samsung's new galaxy phones. You'd have to go down to like a BlackBerry or a Nokia flip phone to have that comparison make sense.
Let's compare the S9 to the S23.
The S23 has Wi-Fi 6E support, Bluetooth 5.3 support, twice as much base storage and RAM, 5G support, an in display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, 3 high resolution cameras, 120hz refresh rate, twice as fast internal storage, a 33% larger battery, a much newer version of Android and to top it off a processor that's roughly 3X as powerful as the S9.
So to me it might not be fair to call the S9 dialup but I would say a comparison between broadband and fiber is pretty accurate. At the very least the other features are worth upgrading for if not the speed. Now I suppose the S9 is still a perfectly good phone to be used as just a phone but these things are really portable computers and the increase in processing power becomes tremendous in a short period of time.
Does your home router support WiFi 6e? your accessories BT 5.3? Your phone carrier stable 5g?
I can understand the battery and the screen improvement. But I also don't think it's as drastic as you claim.
This is an android enthusiast community. For a lot of people here the answers to that are going to be yes, yes and yes.
I think its more about the power efficiency. Samsung's exynos line as well as their few latest samsung foundry nodes are not known for being very power efficient, so I think people were holding for the Pixel 9 with a custom TSMC manufactured chip in hopes of it consuming less power and outputting less heat
But I need to run a web browser at Mach Chicken so I can justify tossing a perfectly good phone for a new $1000 phone.
Because I wanted a foldy boi.
That said, I plan on hanging on to my Z Fold 3 for at least the next half decade.
Pokemon go chugged on that thing. I ran it alongside my oneplus 8 for a while, and I promise it wasn't running perfectly.
Nevermind that the oneplus 8 ran at 50% higher fps.
because i want to play genshin impact on my phone.
Wait until the new iPhone kills the mobile gaming market. It's probably going to be more powerful than the switch 2. Slap on a backbone controller or a dock and you don't need a game console at all.
The current gen android stuff is also pretty capable but nobody makes games that aren't gacha trash for android.
Pushing the leading edge of phone design opens new use cases, it's not always just about "doing the same shit, slightly faster"
Have you thought about why Switch is the best selling console in the current generation even though it's by far the weakest in performance?
The cheapest entry price with the most expensive ongoing cost?
Obviously it's because people are stupid.
Even Apple has to abide by the laws of physics. 3nm is fast, but a small, tightly packed, passively cooled device containing a large, heat generating element powered by a another large, heat generating element is unlikely to outperform a well ventilated, actively cooled device that is able to draw power from an outlet.
This is of couse ignoring the Apple reality distortion field, which in recent memory has succesfully perpetuated the idea that a tiny photo sensor can outperform a large one.
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We've been hearing about Apple coming back to the gaming market for quite a long time now and absolutely nothing happens. The iPhone 15 isn't going to change anything in this regard, it's going to be a party trick with a handful of popular games ported to it and then nothing else.
Don't forget when the games disappear from the stores in the future.
I won't ever forget you Infinity Blade games!
The performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 GPU is already about 10-20% faster than the A16 chip, depending on the benchmark.
Even if Qualcomm only gives the Gen 3 a 10% performance increase, that is enough to beat or even surpass the A17 in gpu performance (rumors suggest something closer to a 30% increase). The Gen 2 already outcompetes the A16 in GPU power consumption and efficiency as well. This may change with the A17 since it’s on TSMC’s 3N node, however this node has been having issues which is why TSMC introduced the 3NE and 3NP so we will have to wait for power usage numbers from the A17 to see.
Overall I’m disappointed with the improvements between the A16 and A17. 10% on the CPU and 20% on the GPU (due to have 20% more cores) doesn’t seem like the type of upgrade I would expect from switching nodes. Hopefully next year they can do more with the improved N3 nodes. I’m also getting the feeling that Apple is trying to deploy more complex transformer models on their devices which is why we are seeing such a focus on the NPU.
I think you hit on the main point which is that nobody will pour money into developing for android. Apple also has the ability to make deals with companies with Capcom and Ubisoft to ensure games come to their platforms. I can’t see Google doing this since they already “tried” and failed to have a AAA mobile gaming platform with stadia. The only other company with enough motivation and money to bring big games to android is Samsung, but their mobile chips aren’t doing too well (despite their RDNA 2 architecture making it easier to port games).
Steam could step in with a proton layer if they wanted to. Android is technically linux already and the newest snapdragon stuff is comparable to the steam deck in raw power.
We're ripe for some multiplatform shenanigans.
Unfortunately, Valve would also have to build a CPU translation layer (Like Rosetta 2) since games run on x86 architectures and snapdragon uses an ARM architecture. The steam deck uses a Zen 2 CPU architecture which is already x86 so there would be little motivation on their part to do this. Currently proton uses wine to convert windows api calls into linux calls. The big thing Proton does is allowing games that use DirectX to run on Vulkan which is natively supported in Linux. So unless Valve makes the Steam Deck 2 with ARM or another company decides to make an x86 to ARM translation layer, then I don't see something like Proton coming to android any time soon.
The base already exists, wine is leveraging qemu for the cpu arch emulation and already has the windows translation layer.
I don't expect them to actually do it, but it would be on the same scale of a project as the proton project that's worked so well for the with the deck.
Maybe epic will do it to get a real deck competitor online, not that I trust those jackals to do it right.
Pushing the leading edge of phone design opens new use cases, it's not always just about "doing the same shit, slightly faster"
It's about creating new shit that runs at the same speed.