A5X chip in Apple's new iPad doubles RAM to 1GB - report

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  • Reply 61 of 114
    umrk_labumrk_lab Posts: 550member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jnjnjn View Post


    Not so. The Apple A5 processor is twice as fast as the Nvidia Tegra 3 and the Apples A5X processor is four times as fast.





    <...> because in absolute numbers its quite impressive (29 GFLOPS).



    J.




    Impressive, indeed especially if we go back to history :



    In 1975, the 80 MHz Cray-1 was announced. Excitement was so high that a bidding war for the first machine broke out between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the latter eventually winning and receiving serial number 001 in 1976 for a six-month trial. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was Cray Research's first official customer in 1977, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks) for serial number 3. <...>



    The 80 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, succeeded the two first models <...>
  • Reply 62 of 114
    recrec Posts: 217member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Pendergast View Post


    It does matter, because otherwise the Tegra 3 is just a paper beast.



    Also, the Tegra 3 is only just catching up to the *year-old* iPad 2 and its A5?



    I'm a developer with relationships to both Apple and Nvidia. So I'm pretty layered up with various tablets- obviously the iPad 1 and 2, I also have Tegra 2 and 3 developer tablets.



    The above numbers sound about right actually. My Nvidia contact, who is also an evangelist for his company, fully admits to me that the Tegra 3 only catches them up to the iPad 2 in terms of performance and in some ways is slower. That's his best spin on the subject. For them it takes a quad core cpu and double the ram just to be "a little bit behind". I personally find this to be pathetic. This is the best competition Apple has and they're losing badly.



    The iPad 2 has the SGX543MP2 GPU which can do about 68 million triangles/second. The SGX543MP4 (not the same model as in the Vita, but similar) in the iPad 3 can do about 130 million triangles/second, almost doubling GPU performance like they advertise. The iPad 3 has literally about 9-10x the GPU performance of the iPad 1 or iPhone 4. I don't know what it will take for Android/Nvidia to catch up to this. I think realistically, in the most unbiased way I can state, Android tablets are about 1.5-2 years behind Apple's curve in terms of overall performance.



    You guys know that being behind by 2 years in the tablet world is an eternity. They may as well not even be players, which they are arguably not. It's not just raw performance of the chipsets either, if you ever spent time with a Tegra 3 that has 4 cores and 1GB ram, you'd start to wonder if the iPad 1 with 1 core and 256MB ram feels smoother. It certainly does for most everday tasks.
  • Reply 63 of 114
    relicrelic Posts: 4,735member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by REC View Post


    I'm a developer with relationships to both Apple and Nvidia. So I'm pretty layered up with various tablets- obviously the iPad 1 and 2, I also have Tegra 2 and 3 developer tablets.



    The above numbers sound about right actually. My Nvidia contact, who is also an evangelist for his company, fully admits to me that the Tegra 3 only catches them up to the iPad 2 in terms of performance and in some ways is slower. That's his best spin on the subject. For them it takes a quad core cpu and double the ram just to be "a little bit behind". I personally find this to be pathetic. This is the best competition Apple has and they're losing badly.



    The iPad 2 has the SGX543MP2 GPU which can do about 68 million triangles/second. The SGX543MP4 (not the same model as in the Vita, but similar) in the iPad 3 can do about 130 million triangles/second, almost doubling GPU performance like they advertise. The iPad 3 has literally about 9-10x the GPU performance of the iPad 1 or iPhone 4. I don't know what it will take for Android/Nvidia to catch up to this. I think realistically, in the most unbiased way I can state, Android tablets are about 1.5-2 years behind Apple's curve in terms of overall performance.



    You guys know that being behind by 2 years in the tablet world is an eternity. They may as well not even be players, which they are arguably not. It's not just raw performance of the chipsets either, if you ever spent time with a Tegra 3 that has 4 cores and 1GB ram, you'd start to wonder if the iPad 1 with 1 core and 256MB ram feels smoother. It certainly does for most everday tasks.



    Aaah I don't think so. Qualcomm and Samsung both have chips that are being released that wipe the floor with the Nvidia Tegra 3. The S4 Pro is a pretty incredible chip, I was in Spain for the MWC and got to play with it. They'll all catch up before Q3 maybe even Q2 and then surpass by December but then Apple will be releasing the A6 in 2013 so your right it will be an ever ending catch up game. Year and half though is just silly.



    Who cares though, my Asus Slider is incredible fast and I have no complaints and it's not even a Tegra 3. I run Ubuntu in a dual boot and even Ubuntu is quick enough.
  • Reply 64 of 114
    toruktoruk Posts: 38member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AdyB View Post


    Is it just me or does this paragraph seem to imply that the A5X is effectively the same as the A5 apart from more onboard RAM. Is there some distinction between the CPU and the system-on-a-chip side of things that I am missing?



    The Apple A5X uses the same duel-core CPU as the Apple A5 and a new quad-core GPU which is the reasoning for the 'X' suffix.



    Quote:

    Phil Schiller speaking about the Apple A5X at the Apple Special Event on 7 March 2012 at 28:15:

    Well, you know the iPad 2 used the A5 chip?Apple designed chip?which is the best chip in a mobile device, to drive a great display. But we needed even more horsepower for this new iPad and it's Retina display. So we've created the Apple A5X chip, and what's the 'X' for? Quad-core graphics. Quad-core graphics designed specifically for the Retina display to drive four times the number of pixels.



    Well, how does that compare to what others are using? Well, others are using chips like this NVIDIA Tegra 3, if you normalise its graphics performance at 1, the Apple A5 was already twice as fast and the new A5X brings four times the performance, it is a graphics powerhouse.




    Quote:

    Steve Jobs speaking about the Apple A5 at the Apple Special Event on 2 March 2012 at 16:17:

    We have a new chip, we call A5, our chip wizards have come up with this and it's great. It's duel-core processors, right, two processors inside and so we get up to twice as fast on CPU performance. But we've really gone all out on the graphics performance. Up to nine times faster graphics. The graphics in this thing are wonderful. Same low power as A4. We don't wanna give up any of that legendary battery life. And, even though others are starting to ship, I think this is going to be the fist duel-core tablet to ship in volume.



    So A5 is really quite an achievement and is gonna give us something that's up to twice as fast on CPU performance, up to nine times faster graphics and the first iPad was no slouch. So, a lot faster with A5.




    Although Apple doesn't specify the amount of RAM in iOS devices, president of Epic Games Mike Capps said during yesterdays presentation at 53:55 that 'this new device actually has more memory and higher screen resolution than an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3'. Knowing that the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 have 512 MB of RAM, Capps comment implies that the iPad has 1 GB of RAM.
  • Reply 65 of 114
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by cmvsm View Post


    This is good stuff. I'll take an updated GPU and RAM over a processor upgrade any day of the week.



    Depending upon the specifIcs of the improvements to that GPU the actual on screen performance could very well be a wash. We will have to wait and see. Otherwise you are right RAM is very important here as is the GPU.
  • Reply 66 of 114
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rednival View Post


    First off, Android is most definitely Linux based. Google just decided to make it's own Java implementation to run most of Android applications. I think they are probably regretting that. First, it does have performance issues. Especially when you cram it on some of the cheap devices that run Android. Also, since Android went mainstream (maybe even because of Android), Oracle acquired Sun and has aggressively perused anyone with so called "unlicensed" Java implementations. Android Java was actually based on Apache's Java implementation which was already in dispute, so it was a poor, poor decision for Google for that reason alone.



    That said, you can write Android software in C++ or even Objective C. In fact, it is encouraged for games.



    That is truth. That is fact.







    I guess I am an idiot for liking my iPad and having an Android phone I actually like. There are things my phone does that my wife could never do with her iPhone, and my phone is not rooted. The extras I have matter to me and keep me from buying an iPhone. They are things that matter on my phone, but do not matter on my tablet.



    Believe it or not, there are legitimate reasons to choose Android over iOS. I do not believe Apple is an evil empire that destroys your freedom. I am perfectly fine with Apple controlling the experience on their devices. Some times though, it boils down to function over form.



    I hate to say this because I know people will attack me without knowing what they are talking about. This is the reality though. I have over a year with both iOS and Android:



    Apple has a major edge over Android on style and ease of use. No doubt.



    Android has a major edge over Apple on capability and customization. No doubt.



    Android also has malware, background process that can cripple your device, and ad ware. It isn't for everyone. But if you want freedom to customize, your choices are Android or a jailbroken iPhone.



    THAT'S the reality. Decide what matters to you and make your choice.



    Personally, I don't find it to be as easy as most people. I supposed that makes me a moron for not being brainwashed that actually thinking rationally. I need to upgrade my phone soon and I am still leaning towards Android since I now have a Macbook and an iPad. Of course, I need to learn more about jailbreaking. A jailbroken iPhone might be the best of both worlds.



    put it this way - there is NO PERFECT SMART PHONE ALONE - its ONLY PERFECT TO THE USER that decided to own IT!
  • Reply 67 of 114
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    Note that is on my iPad one. Right now I have iOS 5.1 installed on my iPhone 4 and have a bit of use under the belt. It does look to be very stable, faster and with far less glitches. Hopefully this is a good sign.



    As to memory, it will help Safari a lot but Safari has many a bug that leads to all sorts of performance issues. Especially troublesome are the ones that force page reloads. If they have corrected these issues I could see my data usage going down.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by chris v View Post


    God, I hope so. That's the most frustrating thing about the iPad. Quite a few times, I'll enter some text, say in a window at a site like this, switch to another tab to grab a link, & when I switch back, the page refreshes & my text is gone. If I want to write anything at all involved on a message board, I do it in notes, then copy and paste the thing. It's a pain.



    Also, I hope iOS 5.1 does something about Safari's bad crashiness. It's nice that it auto-recovers the links that were open when it crashed, but I have to re-launch it 4 or 5 times a day, it seems like.



  • Reply 68 of 114
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    This is where Apple really sucks, they could easily just tell us how much RAM and how fast the cores are. Instead they play games.



    Oh and before anybody says anything it does make a difference, iPad has been RAM starved for far to long.
  • Reply 69 of 114
    mikeb85mikeb85 Posts: 506member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Apple ][ View Post


    I don't know all of the technical details, but I do have two perfectly good functioning eyes, and I know when something looks choppy and not smooth, and I also know crap from good. As for Java, it seems that is what apps are written with on Android. Is that why they suck so much?



    It`s obvious you don`t have a clue about Android or even computers in general. Java is the most used language for apps in the world because you can write an app in Java, and run it on ANY hardware. Now this comes with a performance penalty, because Java apps don`t run natively, they run in a virtual machine (ie. emulator).



    Android also runs native apps, written in C++ (mostly games). C++ runs faster than Java, but apps have to be tailored for the hardware they run on, which means more work for the developer.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Apple ][ View Post


    As for multitasking, a person should learn to walk before they run, and Android doesn't even have the basics down.



    And you're comparing the Android UI to the super smooth and silky iOS UI? When was the last time that you went to an optometrist, because a person doesn't even have to be knowledgeable about tech to see that one is way smoother than the other.



    iOS is smoother mainly because all iOS apps run natively, and because it suspends apps that aren`t in focus. Android will actually continue running most apps in the background, for instance you can be loading multiple webpages, playing games, have torrents downloading in the background, and playing music all at the same time. Like a full desktop computer. If your device isn`t fast enough, it will lag. So it`s up to the user to manage their system`s processes, much like on your desktop, how you shouldn`t run too many things at once.



    If you keep your multitasking to a minimum, Android is silky smooth, especially if you have a high end device.



    By the way, I used to have an iPhone 3G with iOS 4.3. That thing lagged so much I`d press an app button, then just put the phone down because I had to wait 5-10 seconds for anything to happen. It was borderline unusable. The iOS 4 upgrade should have never been allowed for the iPhone 3G. But funny how Apple fans (not users, just the maniacal fans) forgot about this huge blunder, and pretend that iPhones prior to the 3GS didn`t exist, because they were complete trash.



    These problems aren`t iOS or Android issues, it`s how computers work. Plain and simple. And no matter how dumbed down and glossed over smartphones are, they`re still just small computers.
  • Reply 70 of 114
    relicrelic Posts: 4,735member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mikeb85 View Post


    It`s obvious you don`t have a clue about Android or even computers in general. Java is the most used language for apps in the world because you can write an app in Java, and run it on ANY hardware. Now this comes with a performance penalty, because Java apps don`t run natively, they run in a virtual machine (ie. emulator).



    Android also runs native apps, written in C++ (mostly games). C++ runs faster than Java, but apps have to be tailored for the hardware they run on, which means more work for the developer.







    iOS is smoother mainly because all iOS apps run natively, and because it suspends apps that aren`t in focus. Android will actually continue running most apps in the background, for instance you can be loading multiple webpages, playing games, have torrents downloading in the background, and playing music all at the same time. Like a full desktop computer. If your device isn`t fast enough, it will lag. So it`s up to the user to manage their system`s processes, much like on your desktop, how you shouldn`t run too many things at once.



    If you keep your multitasking to a minimum, Android is silky smooth, especially if you have a high end device.



    By the way, I used to have an iPhone 3G with iOS 4.3. That thing lagged so much I`d press an app button, then just put the phone down because I had to wait 5-10 seconds for anything to happen. It was borderline unusable. The iOS 4 upgrade should have never been allowed for the iPhone 3G. But funny how Apple fans (not users, just the maniacal fans) forgot about this huge blunder, and pretend that iPhones prior to the 3GS didn`t exist, because they were complete trash.



    These problems aren`t iOS or Android issues, it`s how computers work. Plain and simple. And no matter how dumbed down and glossed over smartphones are, they`re still just small computers.



    Uh oh your in trouble now, you said a Apple product sucked. These people are going to eat you alive. Now that is said I got my new Samsung Galaxy 7.7 in the mail this morning. Love it, that screen, oh man, it's awesome. I didn't know this but you can make phone calls on it to. The performance is also incredibly fast but sshhhh that's just between you and me we are in dangerous waters talking about something other then Apple.
  • Reply 71 of 114
    mikeb85mikeb85 Posts: 506member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rednival View Post


    First off, Android is most definitely Linux based. Google just decided to make it's own Java implementation to run most of Android applications. I think they are probably regretting that. First, it does have performance issues. Especially when you cram it on some of the cheap devices that run Android. Also, since Android went mainstream (maybe even because of Android), Oracle acquired Sun and has aggressively perused anyone with so called "unlicensed" Java implementations. Android Java was actually based on Apache's Java implementation which was already in dispute, so it was a poor, poor decision for Google for that reason alone.



    That said, you can write Android software in C++ or even Objective C. In fact, it is encouraged for games.



    That is truth. That is fact.



    Natively running apps for Android are also getting more and more popular, which is nice. Java has it`s uses, but is limited.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rednival View Post


    I guess I am an idiot for liking my iPad and having an Android phone I actually like. There are things my phone does that my wife could never do with her iPhone, and my phone is not rooted. The extras I have matter to me and keep me from buying an iPhone. They are things that matter on my phone, but do not matter on my tablet.



    Believe it or not, there are legitimate reasons to choose Android over iOS. I do not believe Apple is an evil empire that destroys your freedom. I am perfectly fine with Apple controlling the experience on their devices. Some times though, it boils down to function over form.



    Absolutely. If my girlfriend or mom wants a phone recommendation, I`ll tell them iPhone for ease of use and features. If a tech inclined friend wants to know, I`ll tell them Android with some caveats...



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rednival View Post


    I hate to say this because I know people will attack me without knowing what they are talking about. This is the reality though. I have over a year with both iOS and Android:



    Apple has a major edge over Android on style and ease of use. No doubt.



    Style depends on manufacturer. Ease of use though, absolutely.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rednival View Post


    Android also has malware, background process that can cripple your device, and ad ware. It isn't for everyone. But if you want freedom to customize, your choices are Android or a jailbroken iPhone.



    One disclaimer about Adware and Malware, Android is very secure and doesn`t just download malware from a malicious site or something. It has to be downloaded by the user, consciously. An informed Android user does not have to worry about these things, just has to be responsible. The uninformed just need to be cautious, and inform themselves. Android experience is very much dependent on the user being responsible for their own device.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rednival View Post


    Personally, I don't find it to be as easy as most people. I supposed that makes me a moron for not being brainwashed that actually thinking rationally. I need to upgrade my phone soon and I am still leaning towards Android since I now have a Macbook and an iPad. Of course, I need to learn more about jailbreaking. A jailbroken iPhone might be the best of both worlds.



    Jailbreaking unfortunately introduces a gray element into the picture, not all jailbreakers are law abiding, and there is the possibility of downloading malicious apps onto a jailbroken device. iOS is no more secure than Android at the OS level, it`s the AppStore and Apple`s ecosystem that prevents malware.
  • Reply 72 of 114
    relicrelic Posts: 4,735member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mikeb85 View Post


    It`s obvious you don`t have a clue about Android or even computers in general. Java is the most used language for apps in the world because you can write an app in Java, and run it on ANY hardware. Now this comes with a performance penalty, because Java apps don`t run natively, they run in a virtual machine (ie. emulator).



    Android also runs native apps, written in C++ (mostly games). C++ runs faster than Java, but apps have to be tailored for the hardware they run on, which means more work for the developer.







    iOS is smoother mainly because all iOS apps run natively, and because it suspends apps that aren`t in focus. Android will actually continue running most apps in the background, for instance you can be loading multiple webpages, playing games, have torrents downloading in the background, and playing music all at the same time. Like a full desktop computer. If your device isn`t fast enough, it will lag. So it`s up to the user to manage their system`s processes, much like on your desktop, how you shouldn`t run too many things at once.



    If you keep your multitasking to a minimum, Android is silky smooth, especially if you have a high end device.



    By the way, I used to have an iPhone 3G with iOS 4.3. That thing lagged so much I`d press an app button, then just put the phone down because I had to wait 5-10 seconds for anything to happen. It was borderline unusable. The iOS 4 upgrade should have never been allowed for the iPhone 3G. But funny how Apple fans (not users, just the maniacal fans) forgot about this huge blunder, and pretend that iPhones prior to the 3GS didn`t exist, because they were complete trash.



    These problems aren`t iOS or Android issues, it`s how computers work. Plain and simple. And no matter how dumbed down and glossed over smartphones are, they`re still just small computers.



    Uh oh your in trouble now, you said a Apple product sucked. These people are going to eat you alive. Now that is said I got my new Samsung Galaxy 7.7 this morning. Yaaaay, love it to death, that screen, oh man, it's awesome. I didn't know this but you can make phone calls on it too. The performance is also incredibly fast but sshhhh that's just between you and me we are in dangerous water here talking about something other then Apple. Hey I waited, I heard a rumor Apple would introduce a 7 inch, nope, so on to the next best thing. Right choice, defiantly the right choice, best tablet I have ever owned.
  • Reply 73 of 114
    mikeb85mikeb85 Posts: 506member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Relic View Post


    Uh oh your in trouble now, you said a Apple product sucked. These people are going to eat you alive. Now that is said I got my new Samsung Galaxy 7.7 in the mail this morning. Love it, that screen, oh man, it's awesome. I didn't know this but you can make phone calls on it to. The performance is also incredibly fast but sshhhh that's just between you and me we are in dangerous waters talking about something other then Apple.



    The iPhone 3G did suck. That`s the truth. The 4 was a gamechanger, the 4S I even considered, but the 3G was terrible. In fact, my 3G was so bad, that now my girlfriend is completely terrified of updating the OS on her 3GS, even though most Apps are no longer able to run on her phone (she still has iOS 3.something).
  • Reply 74 of 114
    relicrelic Posts: 4,735member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Relic View Post


    Uh oh your in trouble now, you said a Apple product sucked. These people are going to eat you alive. Now that is said I got my new Samsung Galaxy 7.7 this morning. Yaaaay, love it to death, that screen, oh man, it's awesome. I didn't know this but you can make phone calls on it too. The performance is also incredibly fast but sshhhh that's just between you and me we are in dangerous water here talking about something other then Apple. Hey I waited, I heard a rumor Apple would introduce a 7 inch, nope, so on to the next best thing. Right choice, defiantly the right choice, best tablet I have ever owned.



    Oh and tomorrow comes my white N9, I just got a sms from the post that I can come and pick it up. So excited. New tablet and new phone, although the N9 is just a toy that I've been waiting for to lower in price I will still charish it none the less. Now Meego, there is a full multitasking OS none of that pausing crap that iOS and Android does, ha ha. I can't wait to install a LAMP server on that thing, what am I talking about, it's a Debian Linux box with a fancy Xwindows. I can install any Linux program I want on it, not just LAMP. Hmmmm, let's see Gimp, FireFox, Android SDK, Eclipse maybe. Oh I can't wait.
  • Reply 75 of 114
    relicrelic Posts: 4,735member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mikeb85 View Post


    The iPhone 3G did suck. That`s the truth. The 4 was a gamechanger, the 4S I even considered, but the 3G was terrible. In fact, my 3G was so bad, that now my girlfriend is completely terrified of updating the OS on her 3GS, even though most Apps are no longer able to run on her phone (she still has iOS 3.something).



    Never owned one myself, actually the iPhone 4 was my first Apple phone. I was a Blackberry user before that and before that a Nokia Communicator user. Wasn't to impressed with the iPhone, liked that hardware no doubt, just replaced it with a Nokia Lumia 800 for private and a Samsung Note for work.
  • Reply 76 of 114
    michael scripmichael scrip Posts: 1,916member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by REC View Post


    I'm a developer with relationships to both Apple and Nvidia. So I'm pretty layered up with various tablets- obviously the iPad 1 and 2, I also have Tegra 2 and 3 developer tablets.



    The above numbers sound about right actually. My Nvidia contact, who is also an evangelist for his company, fully admits to me that the Tegra 3 only catches them up to the iPad 2 in terms of performance and in some ways is slower. That's his best spin on the subject. For them it takes a quad core cpu and double the ram just to be "a little bit behind". I personally find this to be pathetic. This is the best competition Apple has and they're losing badly.



    The iPad 2 has the SGX543MP2 GPU which can do about 68 million triangles/second. The SGX543MP4 (not the same model as in the Vita, but similar) in the iPad 3 can do about 130 million triangles/second, almost doubling GPU performance like they advertise. The iPad 3 has literally about 9-10x the GPU performance of the iPad 1 or iPhone 4. I don't know what it will take for Android/Nvidia to catch up to this. I think realistically, in the most unbiased way I can state, Android tablets are about 1.5-2 years behind Apple's curve in terms of overall performance.



    You guys know that being behind by 2 years in the tablet world is an eternity. They may as well not even be players, which they are arguably not. It's not just raw performance of the chipsets either, if you ever spent time with a Tegra 3 that has 4 cores and 1GB ram, you'd start to wonder if the iPad 1 with 1 core and 256MB ram feels smoother. It certainly does for most everday tasks.



    Apple supposedly has 1,000 engineers working on chips.



    I wonder how that compares to NVidia or others?



    http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20...s-report-says/
  • Reply 77 of 114
    misamisa Posts: 827member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mikeb85 View Post


    It`s obvious you don`t have a clue about Android or even computers in general. Java is the most used language for apps in the world because you can write an app in Java, and run it on ANY hardware. Now this comes with a performance penalty, because Java apps don`t run natively, they run in a virtual machine (ie. emulator).



    Android also runs native apps, written in C++ (mostly games). C++ runs faster than Java, but apps have to be tailored for the hardware they run on, which means more work for the developer.



    This is the argument Android developers make when they say they hate it and build iOS versions first.



    Android is a very ugly kludge, you have this ugly slow Dalvik Java-like thing that has to be interfaced with do do any visual, audio or input. Google should just have it put down if they want to catch up to iOS. Forcing developers to write 10% of their code in Java is a bloody nightmare. They likely picked Java because originally they were aiming to steal RIM's thunder, and the easiest way to do that was tell the J2ME people to hit recompile.



    But Java is a super-poor choice for a mobile platform just like Flash is. Java and Flash put an additional layer of CPU stress, and poorly developed applications basically do this



    Code:


    while(exit!=true){

    flip();

    render();

    playsound();

    }







    So when you run these things, they just grab all the CPU available. This works fine on a desktop or a server where the application can use 100% of a cpu core and the OS will take cycles away from it if it needs it. But on a mobile platform you need something more like this:

    Code:




    if(returnfromSuspend){restorestateofapplication(); }

    while(!idle){

    if(applicationInForground){draw();ProcessInput();}

    ProcessBackground();

    }

    if(OSsaysSuspend){

    savestateofapplication();exit();

    }









    Android is just plain fustrating to develop for, because every device is different. You see why Java might make sense, because you can just compile it one time and you are at least gauranteed that it will execute on every device. However it doesn't mean it will have good performance, and any shortcuts taken by the device manufacturer will show up.



    Google should just cut their losses with the manufacturers, adopt a native-code model and throw away the existing Java-like headache. It would make more sense to just keep the code intermediately compiled, and then compile-on-the-fly for new devices and processor types with a validation test (application must compile with zero errors and zero warnings and have >100% performance on base hardware.)



    I like Google and all, but some of their development directions leave me scratching my head as to why they prefer the lazy engineering technique of throw more hardware/money at the problem instead of optimizing. Just look at the Chrome browser for memory waste.
  • Reply 78 of 114
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Michael Scrip View Post


    Apple supposedly has 1,000 engineers working on chips.



    Hopefully six guys in blue jeans won't show them up.
  • Reply 79 of 114
    mikeb85mikeb85 Posts: 506member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Relic View Post


    Oh and tomorrow comes my white N9, I just got a sms from the post that I can come and pick it up. So excited. New tablet and new phone, although the N9 is just a toy that I've been waiting for to lower in price I will still charish it none the less. Now Meego, there is a full multitasking OS none of that pausing crap that iOS and Android does, ha ha. I can't wait to install a LAMP server on that thing, what am I talking about, it's a Debian Linux box with a fancy Xwindows. I can install any Linux program I want on it, not just LAMP. Hmmmm, let's see Gimp, FireFox, Android SDK, Eclipse maybe. Oh I can't wait.



    True, Meego was and is probably the best mobile platform, until it got orphaned. Alot of the traditional players (Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Ericsson) just keep dropping the ball...
  • Reply 80 of 114
    rednivalrednival Posts: 331member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mikeb85 View Post


    One disclaimer about Adware and Malware, Android is very secure and doesn`t just download malware from a malicious site or something. It has to be downloaded by the user, consciously. An informed Android user does not have to worry about these things, just has to be responsible. The uninformed just need to be cautious, and inform themselves. Android experience is very much dependent on the user being responsible for their own device.



    You are right and I take responsibility for what I put on my phone. I had a couple of friends that downloaded tons of stuff to their phone. I am not sure they ever had any malware running, but they certainly had a ton of apps that ran in the background eating up their memory and CPU. So their Android experiences were less than rewarding. So they switched to iPhone and love it.



    I guess it also depends largely on how you define "Malware". I recently downloaded an app that put ads in my notification bar. If that's not malware it is at least crap ware.



    Since Google offers a way to install apps outside the market, I sometimes wish they would tighten down a little more. But that's just me.
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