Diminishing returns on mobile devices?
October 23, 2013 11:22 AM Subscribe
With the news of the iPad Air and it's wonder 64-bit A7 processor, my curiosity is up again. Will mobile devices, phones or tablets, hit a point of diminishing returns in regards to processing power and/or RAM?
That depends on the types of returns you're talking about.
Probably there is a diminishing returns effect when it comes to powering current apps, but almost certainly future apps will be able to take advantage of hardware improvements to power advanced graphics, real-time physics, post-process photos better, etc. These new apps will probably drive people to upgrade their tablets and phones over time.
Or do you mean where battery life or heat management becomes limiting and more powerful CPUs/GPUs become a liability?
posted by Mercaptan at 11:34 AM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
Probably there is a diminishing returns effect when it comes to powering current apps, but almost certainly future apps will be able to take advantage of hardware improvements to power advanced graphics, real-time physics, post-process photos better, etc. These new apps will probably drive people to upgrade their tablets and phones over time.
Or do you mean where battery life or heat management becomes limiting and more powerful CPUs/GPUs become a liability?
posted by Mercaptan at 11:34 AM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: I suppose I mean, will apps continue to be able to take advantage of the increases in processing power and RAM, or will the constraints of the size and other hardware eventually bring the new apps to a plateau in that regard.
posted by trogdole at 11:53 AM on October 23, 2013
posted by trogdole at 11:53 AM on October 23, 2013
will apps continue to be able to take advantage of the increases in processing power and RAM
If by take advantage, you mean will the processor run near full capacity and will all the RAM be used up? Definitely. As processing resources become more plentiful, programming gets sloppier. Why clean and optimize code if it already runs at full speed without hiccups?
This is essentially what happened with PCs as well - even Windows itself. Remember how Vista was a bloated OS and ran slowly in many regards? Windows 7 was slimmed down in response to Vista's bad press, and had the same minimum hardware requirements despite coming out years later, even with more advanced functions under the hood.
posted by trivia genius at 11:57 AM on October 23, 2013
If by take advantage, you mean will the processor run near full capacity and will all the RAM be used up? Definitely. As processing resources become more plentiful, programming gets sloppier. Why clean and optimize code if it already runs at full speed without hiccups?
This is essentially what happened with PCs as well - even Windows itself. Remember how Vista was a bloated OS and ran slowly in many regards? Windows 7 was slimmed down in response to Vista's bad press, and had the same minimum hardware requirements despite coming out years later, even with more advanced functions under the hood.
posted by trivia genius at 11:57 AM on October 23, 2013
I think there are always application makers that will take advantage of increased speed and RAM, no question. Think of the restrictions on iOS games versus desktop or console games-- in five years, mobile devices will be able to do what consoles can do today.
Display is one area where we've reached a ceiling: what our eyes can discern at 2-3 feet. There's no similar natural ceiling for program complexity.
They'll also continue to get lighter, thinner, and have better battery life, at least until we start running into atomic restrictions-- can't have a transistor (or transistor equivalent in silicon) smaller than an atom.
posted by supercres at 11:58 AM on October 23, 2013
Display is one area where we've reached a ceiling: what our eyes can discern at 2-3 feet. There's no similar natural ceiling for program complexity.
They'll also continue to get lighter, thinner, and have better battery life, at least until we start running into atomic restrictions-- can't have a transistor (or transistor equivalent in silicon) smaller than an atom.
posted by supercres at 11:58 AM on October 23, 2013
Mobile devices will follow a similar path to "desktop" computers. At some point the hardware specs will meet the needs of the software to such a degree that the majority of people will see no reason to upgrade. Once that market is mature, the manufacturers will adapt their offerings, and many will move into higher-margin (or more exploitable) markets (eg: wearable computing, or whatever comes next).
posted by blue_beetle at 12:34 PM on October 23, 2013
posted by blue_beetle at 12:34 PM on October 23, 2013
Apple's new processors are crazy powerful, but they also promote better battery life. I believe that's their focus for the years ahead.
How does a faster processor give better battery life? The current design thinking is that you run as fast as you can for very short bursts and then hibernate the processor until the next time it's needed. The faster you can make your core run during these 'on' times - combined with an O/S that knows how to organize tasks to manage program flow and demand - the less energy you use.
Apple's recent developments with Mavericks also show these ideas in use today.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:42 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
How does a faster processor give better battery life? The current design thinking is that you run as fast as you can for very short bursts and then hibernate the processor until the next time it's needed. The faster you can make your core run during these 'on' times - combined with an O/S that knows how to organize tasks to manage program flow and demand - the less energy you use.
Apple's recent developments with Mavericks also show these ideas in use today.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:42 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
Intel is following along the same line - the most-touted benefit of their new "Haswell" chips is lower power consumption that lets them fit into a laptop or Windows tablet without giving a battery life measured in the wing-flaps of a hummingbird. There will be more of that, and more upgrades to 64-bit processors (which Apple just did with the iPhone 5S and new iPads), which allow for much bigger RAM numbers.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 1:10 PM on October 23, 2013
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 1:10 PM on October 23, 2013
There are a few key metrics that, once surpassed, don't yield much in the way of improvement. For reacting to input (button press, etc.) the rule of thumb is that a response within 100 milliseconds (.1 seconds) might as well be instantaneous. So once your tablet can can open up an app within 100 ms, anything faster than that is not going to be perceived as faster. Sure, you might be able to tell if you were paying attention, but an average person would not notice. This timing is about what you'd expect when dealing with normal human reaction times of about 250ms.
The other time is the time needed to render a frame of graphics. Here is rule of thumb is 16 ms, which gives 60 frames per second. Anything slower than this has noticeable studdering, anything much faster isn't noticeable in casual use. This time is a lot smaller than the response time, because our eyes are much faster than our fingers.
The final metric is the display resolution. Apple touts its Retina displays, which are excellent but now many companies have similar screens. The actual metric is complicated because it involves both the resolution (spacing between individual pixels) as well as the distance of the observer, so it's specified in pixels per degree. However, it's generally accepted that the iPhone 4 display, which is 3.5 inches diagonally and has 326 pixels per inch, is dense enough that additional resolution has little benefit. Again, this depends on your eyesight, the lighting conditions, the application (text is much more sensitive than graphics to resolution), etc.
Again, this isn't for all people and all applications. I expect that games will continue to consume graphics resources until they reach the point of fully immersive 3D movie-quality rendering, but email, web browsing, etc. is pretty darn close to perfect already.
posted by wnissen at 1:13 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
The other time is the time needed to render a frame of graphics. Here is rule of thumb is 16 ms, which gives 60 frames per second. Anything slower than this has noticeable studdering, anything much faster isn't noticeable in casual use. This time is a lot smaller than the response time, because our eyes are much faster than our fingers.
The final metric is the display resolution. Apple touts its Retina displays, which are excellent but now many companies have similar screens. The actual metric is complicated because it involves both the resolution (spacing between individual pixels) as well as the distance of the observer, so it's specified in pixels per degree. However, it's generally accepted that the iPhone 4 display, which is 3.5 inches diagonally and has 326 pixels per inch, is dense enough that additional resolution has little benefit. Again, this depends on your eyesight, the lighting conditions, the application (text is much more sensitive than graphics to resolution), etc.
Again, this isn't for all people and all applications. I expect that games will continue to consume graphics resources until they reach the point of fully immersive 3D movie-quality rendering, but email, web browsing, etc. is pretty darn close to perfect already.
posted by wnissen at 1:13 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]
in all three of his points, I am with wnissen. perceptive and articulate summary.
one thing i would suggest is a caveat is that so far, i have been continually surprised by the niches that have been addressed by the 1,000,000 apps in the Apple store. seems there can't be more, right? i mean, what does humanity do? a million different app-able things? 100K? 10k?
more computational horsepower will probably open up relatively few new ones. what is MIPS limited now? what would you avoid even trying because the MIPS cost is too high? i can't think of much, but i don't do games or heavy duty graphics stuff on my ipad. other than games, i cannot think of anything so urgent that a performance-limited app will be able to do on a mobile platform that would command millions of users.
still, i am certain to replace my ipad2-64 at this juncture. for the MIPS? no. for the better camera, the retina, for wear and tear, for smoothness and speed. then, it will be another 3 years or more before i do again.
posted by FauxScot at 5:01 PM on October 23, 2013
one thing i would suggest is a caveat is that so far, i have been continually surprised by the niches that have been addressed by the 1,000,000 apps in the Apple store. seems there can't be more, right? i mean, what does humanity do? a million different app-able things? 100K? 10k?
more computational horsepower will probably open up relatively few new ones. what is MIPS limited now? what would you avoid even trying because the MIPS cost is too high? i can't think of much, but i don't do games or heavy duty graphics stuff on my ipad. other than games, i cannot think of anything so urgent that a performance-limited app will be able to do on a mobile platform that would command millions of users.
still, i am certain to replace my ipad2-64 at this juncture. for the MIPS? no. for the better camera, the retina, for wear and tear, for smoothness and speed. then, it will be another 3 years or more before i do again.
posted by FauxScot at 5:01 PM on October 23, 2013
There are a few key metrics that, once surpassed, don't yield much in the way of improvement. For reacting to input (button press, etc.) the rule of thumb is that a response within 100 milliseconds (.1 seconds) might as well be instantaneous. So once your tablet can can open up an app within 100 ms, anything faster than that is not going to be perceived as faster. Sure, you might be able to tell if you were paying attention, but an average person would not notice. This timing is about what you'd expect when dealing with normal human reaction times of about 250ms.
The other time is the time needed to render a frame of graphics. Here is rule of thumb is 16 ms, which gives 60 frames per second. Anything slower than this has noticeable studdering, anything much faster isn't noticeable in casual use. This time is a lot smaller than the response time, because our eyes are much faster than our fingers.
Well both of these may be true, but I don't think they're very good metrics for determining the value of more CPU or ram. Assuming a constant FPS in a 3D engine, for example, that still lives plenty of room for richer simulation, more polygons, better lighting, so on and so forth. And for apps -- it may take the same amount of time to load a music sequencer, but you can always add more CPU for more synths and effects and so on.
posted by empath at 8:09 PM on October 23, 2013
The other time is the time needed to render a frame of graphics. Here is rule of thumb is 16 ms, which gives 60 frames per second. Anything slower than this has noticeable studdering, anything much faster isn't noticeable in casual use. This time is a lot smaller than the response time, because our eyes are much faster than our fingers.
Well both of these may be true, but I don't think they're very good metrics for determining the value of more CPU or ram. Assuming a constant FPS in a 3D engine, for example, that still lives plenty of room for richer simulation, more polygons, better lighting, so on and so forth. And for apps -- it may take the same amount of time to load a music sequencer, but you can always add more CPU for more synths and effects and so on.
posted by empath at 8:09 PM on October 23, 2013
I suppose I mean, will apps continue to be able to take advantage of the increases in processing power and RAM, or will the constraints of the size and other hardware eventually bring the new apps to a plateau in that regard.
The new chips were announced concordant with benchmarks showing a doubling of performance over the previous model. Subsequently, Apple brought in a popular video game as a concrete demonstration of these improvements. As long as there are power apps (like games), there will be a need to engineer better chips to meet demand.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:45 PM on October 23, 2013
The new chips were announced concordant with benchmarks showing a doubling of performance over the previous model. Subsequently, Apple brought in a popular video game as a concrete demonstration of these improvements. As long as there are power apps (like games), there will be a need to engineer better chips to meet demand.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:45 PM on October 23, 2013
« Older Help me find a wired alternative to Apple's Magic... | The Stuff Their Website Won't Tell You Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
The thing is that the app store developers have to target the Lowest Common Hardware Denominator or run the risk of a deluge of bad reviews by people on lesser hardware so there isn't actually that much pressure to upgrade mobile handheld computers in the same way there is/was for desktop/laptop computing. I am not sure my parents will ever upgrade their iPad as long as it still works.
posted by srboisvert at 11:32 AM on October 23, 2013