RIM demonstrates PlayBook with faster Web browsing than Apple's iPad - Page 7

Originally Posted by samab

You should assume that even if the Playbook has the same CPU, the same RAM and the same webkit as the ipad --- the Playbook would be faster, simply because QNX would have the expertise to optimize it for the limited resources available.

Originally Posted by djsherly

Buying device != implied satisfaction with all aspects of said device.

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum

Except, you conveniently overlook the fact that Apple builds the CPU, RAM, etc. on a single custom chip and removes unnecessary baggage -- then designs the iOS software to exploit the hardware.

That's why, a slower, optimized, software/hardware combination often can (and does) outperform faster software optimized for faster hardware.

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Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum

OK, Got it... it's 2 vs say, 99,999,998 (assuming that you 2 whiners have bought an iOS device).

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Originally Posted by samab

You conveniently overlook the fact that the A4 uses all stock components. It was really a cost related move (to take out a few hardware items that Apple doesn't need). Nothing to do with the performance of the machine.

Originally Posted by samab

You conveniently overlook the fact that the A4 uses all stock components. It was really a cost related move (to take out a few hardware items that Apple doesn't need). Nothing to do with the performance of the machine.

The Cortex-A8 core used in the A4 is thought to use performance enhancements developed by chip designer Intrinsity (which was subsequently acquired by Apple)[10] in collaboration with Samsung.[11] The resulting core, dubbed "Hummingbird", is able to run at far higher clock rates than other implementations while remaining fully compatible with the Cortex-A8 design provided by ARM.[12] Other performance improvements include additional L2 cache. The same Cortex-A8 CPU core used in the A4 is also used in Samsung's S5PC110A01 SoC.[13][14]
The A4 processor package does not contain RAM, but supports PoP installation. The top package of the A4 used in the iPad & iPod touch[15] 4th gen contains two low-power 128 MB DDR SDRAM chips for a total of 256MB RAM. For the iPhone 4 there are two chips of 256 MB for a total of 512 MB.[16][17][18] RAM is connected to the processor using ARM's 64-bit-wide AMBA 3 AXI bus. This is twice the width of the RAM data bus used in previous ARM 11 and ARM 9 based Apple devices, to support the greater need for graphics bandwidth in the iPad.[19]

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum

Yeah, except you are wrong.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A4

http://www.patentlyapple.com/patentl...-surfaces.html

What you got?

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Originally Posted by samab

RIM CEO was already talking about the possibility of doing quad-cores yesterday at web 2.0 --- simply because QNX can. And we are talking about iOS that can't do real multi-tasking yet.

Originally Posted by TNSF

What exactly is "real" multitasking? The ability to kill your battery by running a background app that doesn't add any value when running in the background?

RIM has yet to demonstrate the benefits of their "real" or "true" multitasking. So far it just looks like a really great way for sloppy developers to eat your battery.

Originally Posted by samab

Don't need to demonstrate the benefits at all. It is just a great way to illustrate that their OS has a firm foundation to build on.

Battery life and heat dissipation is going to follow the desktop CPU path --- cell phones will go quad-core and RIM can do that with their current QNX kernel.

Originally Posted by TNSF

"true" multitasking is a feature. Consumers buy benefits. Indeed, if RIM wants to differentiate based on multitasking then they need demonstrate the benefits. Otherwise consumers will simply be swayed by the sexiness of Apple products and Jobs' reality distortion field.

Originally Posted by samab

Don't need to demonstrate the benefits at all. It is just a great way to illustrate that their OS has a firm foundation to build on.

Battery life and heat dissipation is going to follow the desktop CPU path --- cell phones will go quad-core and RIM can do that with their current QNX kernel.

Originally Posted by Nobodyy

You say this like iOS (and even UNIX) cannot do this. I don't understand why you think rebuilding a kernel would be such a big deal and why a solid component has such a downturn to a split-component system.

QNX is fast. It can run a GUI. However, it has not been put to the task of running a complex mobile device so you can't make any just predictions. Everything you mentioned can be done with QNX's kernel, however, everything would have to be adjusted to do it correctly and efficiently. You can't just stick a new block in there and suppose it will operate right, that's when you get Windows.

Originally Posted by samab

There is nothing really complex about a mobile device. You think it's complex, but the QNX people handle these things regularly.

Originally Posted by samab


There is nothing really complex about a mobile device. You think it's complex, but the QNX people handle these things regularly.

Originally Posted by rhyde

Bondai? (sp?)

Originally Posted by TNSF

"true" multitasking is a feature. Consumers buy benefits. Indeed, if RIM wants to differentiate based on multitasking then they need demonstrate the benefits. Otherwise consumers will simply be swayed by the sexiness of Apple products and Jobs' reality distortion field.

What do consumers need from multitasking? Background music, streaming, VOIP, no need to reload an app upon resume, etc. These will already be offered by iPad within a week. What is RIM bringing to the table besides a buzz word and marketing jibber jabber?

True multitasking? Super! Now I can play a video of fish in the background while I do email. I can't see the video, but isn't it great knowing that its playing in the background due to true multitasking? Amazing!

Originally Posted by samab

I didn't say that. I said --- does Apple need to do a lot of work if they go dual core or quad core. It is about time to market. We know that RIM can do it without requiring a single change in the QNX kernel. Even if they require some changes, the amount of change required for QNX would be smaller than the amount required for iOS or webOS --- simply because QNX was designed to work on embedded stuff (that is even smaller than the smartphones/tablets) from day 1.

There is nothing really complex about a mobile device. You think it's complex, but the QNX people handle these things regularly.

Originally Posted by samab

I didn't say that. I said --- does Apple need to do a lot of work if they go dual core or quad core. It is about time to market. We know that RIM can do it without requiring a single change in the QNX kernel. Even if they require some changes, the amount of change required for QNX would be smaller than the amount required for iOS or webOS --- simply because QNX was designed to work on embedded stuff (that is even smaller than the smartphones/tablets) from day 1.

There is nothing really complex about a mobile device. You think it's complex, but the QNX people handle these things regularly.

Originally Posted by Nobodyy

QNX is (nowadays) targeted towards embedded systems such as CPUs, not an entire muktifunctional OS. Apple does not need to do that much more work to implement multiple cores, just as others have stated, OS X has been able to take advantage of them since the creation of GCD. The kernel would need work to take advantage of it (I assume, I don't know how the kernel handles multiple cores by default, especially in iOS), but QNX would have the same drawback. It is not significantly less work, in both cases it requires work. Don't forget that QNX operates as separate systems (hense the microkernel); to take full advantage you would need to make a new block and modify other systems to take advantage of the new one. Things are not not automatic in the kernel level, QNX or iOS, and you can't lay things on top to core hardware like you could with a baseband.

A mobile device is very complex. Unlike embedded systems, there are a lot more things that need to be managed. This is why i dislike microkernels in complicated designs. The fact that everything is split and many of the components are stuck at the "user space" level causes fragmentation of the core. In some cases this is good, in others it is not. QNX isn't a bad move, but that doesnt mean that it is completely godsent.

Originally Posted by samab

QNX has always been self-hosted and run as a desktop pc machine. I used this in high-school in the late 80's.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/...asp?c=971&st=1

BILLIONS of feature cell phones have been manufactured to use microkernels.

The whole iOS is basically sitting in user space --- as a guest OS on top of a RTOS/hypervisor which runs the baseband. That's a lot more complicated to have 2 different OS'es.

Originally Posted by addabox

Again, none of this matters. The technical details of how the code is deployed is only interesting insofar as it enables a top-notch user experience, and even then is no kind of guarantee that such a user experience will be designed and implemented.

Just because QNX is powerful, or compact, or efficient, or any other qualities you'd like to attribute to it, doesn't really tell us anything about what a given vendor might actually do with it. Obviously, you want OS underpinnings that are capable of getting the job done, but then begins the hard work of making a mobile device that gracefully integrates a wide range of functionality with an intuitive, pleasant to use UI, a robust set of developer tools, and useful connections to other devices and peripherals.

Far more than desktop or laptop computers, mobile devices are almost entirely creatures of user experience. We want the hardware to disappear, so that we might easily and directly manipulate our content on the screen. People aren't going to be buying a bucket of hardware specs and software press releases, they're going to be buying a user experience. I've yet to see anything about QNX that tells me anything about what kind of user experience it might likely deliver in the hands of RIM-- and certainly links to 25 year old desktop computers doesn't help.

Originally Posted by solipsism

On a positive note, Im glad to see samab participating in topics other than Verizon and CDMA.

Originally Posted by samab


The whole iOS is basically sitting in user space --- as a guest OS on top of a RTOS/hypervisor which runs the baseband. That's a lot more complicated to have 2 different OS'es.

Originally Posted by nht

You DO realize that in microkernal architechtures pretty much everything possible is shoved into userspace? iOS is no more a "guest OS" above Mach than the unixy parts of qnx are guest OS above the qnx kernel. You also realize that both Mach and qnx are microkernels right? Because otherwise I'd be thinking you have no clue what you are talking about. Especially with the bs about "true" multitasking.

What folks should be more concerned about is whether air actionscript has been made multithreaded. As far as I'm aware, while the underlying flash is multithreaded the air deva are limited in developing single threaded apps. Talk about limiting.

iOS apps are native against the iOS APIs. Playbook apps are singly threaded apps running in a "guest" OS above qnx made by adobe. Your system is only as good as your weakest link and adobe AIR completely obliterates any possible advantage of the qnx kernel over mach. And I think the iOS core APIs are far better suited fir rich app development than qnx middleware with an rtos focus. The domain areas are totally different.

Originally Posted by samab

I do remember Mach, but the discussion was about how it was "complicated" the QNX microkernel supposed to be because stuff are pushed into the userspace. So we have iphone with a RTOS microkernel/hypervisor doing baseband and then mach runs on top of that and then iOS/OS X stuff runs on top of that.

RIM/QNX advises people to do use native codes for multithreading stuff and use flash just for the UI front-end.

Originally Posted by solipsism

On a positive note, Im glad to see samab participating in topics other than Verizon and CDMA.

Originally Posted by samab

Yet Apple is public enemy number 1 on the net neutrality issue by the law professor who coined the term and GSMA just established a working group on embedding SIM cards into the cell phone's silicon. Maybe CDMA was correct all along.

Originally Posted by nht

You know I missed you saying something that stupid due to your other more stupid comment regarding iOS lacking true multitasking which caused subsequent poor reading comprehension on my part.

You DO know where the baseband OS runs right? Hint: There is something called the baseband processor on the iphone. In the iphone 3g/gs that's the PMB8878. On the 4 that's the pmb9800. It has it's own ram and is a ARM1176 running at 416MHz.

iOS does NOT run on top of the baseband OS running in the baseband processor. iOS runs on the primary application processor...the A4.

There was maybe one comment regarding the complexity of microkernels not scaling well to more complex OSs vs use within a RTOS. While this is sorta true, I think we can say that OSX shows this isn't all that big a deal anymore. The QNX kernel has some advantages of Mach but total system performance depends on all the layers working well together. And QNX doesn't have some magical advantages over OSX/iOS/mach in terms of multiprocessor/multicore support.

I'm thinking that doing AIR based UIs and QNX based native code is a bit rube goldberg and risky on RIMs part from the perspective of gaining new devs. It's one thing to make a decent looking flash UI in a vehicle with in house devs. It's another to make it not a huge annoyance for app devs. This is one area that both Apple and MS work hard at. Google, a little less so.

QNX? I've never developed for QNX but I have for VxWorks and other RTOS (Lynx, pSOS). It's never been a high pri item for RTOS makers. Developing for an RTOS is a pain in the ass with far more complexities than for a general purpose OS. The last thing as an app developer that I want to do is have to deal with the annoyances of an RTOS.

Originally Posted by samab

But in the Qualcomm world, the application processor is the baseband processor as well.

Originally Posted by nht

This has nothing to do with your complete fabrication about how iOS runs on the baseband processor and OS as a guest OS but does show you haven't run out of stupid things to say.

I would attribute it to simple ignorance but the trolling is willful and repeated.

Originally Posted by samab

No, it has something to do with recent rumors of ipad2 going with qualcomm.