anonconformist

JustSomeGuy1 said:

If you look beyond the obvious "they're cheating" response, this opens up some fascinating questions.

*Why* are they doing this? The answer is a lot less obvious than you'd think. Benchmarking apps will use as much CPU as they can get their hands on, and so will obviously be affected by being on the list, but most of those 10,000 apps should not be. After all, MS Office, Netflix, Tiktok - generally speaking, none of them require full CPU utilization. They're just not doing that much work.

So why are they listed? DVFS should be enough to manage the CPU for all these apps! And even though the DVFS implementation on various Androids has sometimes been poor, it should still be better than the ridiculously blunt instrument this throttle is.

In fact, this throttle is likely bad for battery life in most cases. Race-to-idle is demonstrably the best way to go, in almost all cases. The only exception would be if the CPU were set to run so far off the optimal voltage that running at full speed was dramatically more expensive than executing the same number of cycles at lower speeds, which shouldn't be the case, except possibly for a couple of the recent Qualcomm chips (and I'm skeptical even for those). Even then the DVFS implementation would have to be totally broken.

The two major obvious exceptions to this general rule are benchmarks and graphics-intensive games. On PCs/Macs, you'd also include video editing and a few other things, but these are phones, so that's mostly not a thing. And those aren't going to be on the throttle list or the phone will show up as slow when tested. So... what's the throttle for? Can they have broken DVFS that badly?

This is really really weird.

Edited to add: I could imagine using this kind of tool to deal with very badly written apps that suck up all available CPU for no reason - say, an app with a busy idle loop. But there can't be that many of those.

jdw said:

Businesses exist to make profit.  Everything else is secondary.  This is not a praise or condemnation but rather a statement of fact. It is capitalism.  And whether one likes Capitalism or not, it is largely the system used in the USA, where most of you reside.  Employees are treated in part in accordance with the law, but also in part from the benevolence, or lack therefore, of the company which hires them.  If prices are raised too high to pay a living wage, then such could negatively impact sales, reduce profits, and call the entire business into question.  

The problem with rent (living cost) is specific to California state, so if the prices of Apple products sold in California state were to rise in accordance with the cost of living there, but not have an equivalent rise in other states where the cost of living is lower, then fiscally-minded consumers would be inclined to buy from those other lower cost states instead, thereby resulting in fewer visitors to Apple stores in CA.

For this reason, Apple alone cannot resolve high rent prices in CA state, unless it diversifies into real estate and housing and then rents to home seekers for low prices, but then you'd have Big Brother jumping in yet again to cry about anti-trust.

The entire conversation about overpriced rent in CA, and what constitutes a living wage, and whether wages along should be raised to compensate for rising living expenses (instead of an alternative solution that seeks to lower price inflation, keep rent costs in check, or even reduce living costs overall) is a debate that transcends Apple.  Apple is simply caught up in a much bigger problem that it cannot solve by itself, despite being one of the biggest corporations around.  All we are doing in this forum right now is discussing how we think and feel about Apple's PR within the confines of this complex topic.  It superficially "looks better" if Apple pays CA employees more in light of their higher rent, and may even make some employees feel better for a few months, but increasing wages in CA would only drive living costs up further, and soon people would be back to complaining about Apple yet again at that point.  All the while, prices of Apple products would need to be increased to compensate for higher wages, leading to numerous other problems in the marketplace.

This is not an argument against higher wages.  This is an explanation about what drives up the cost of living.  Higher wages really do trigger price inflation at some point.  

The ideal solution, whatever that may be, would be to have wages increase with no matching increase in the cost of living.  (For example, here in Japan, I've paid the same rent for a rented home to my landlord for more than 12 years.) CA state needs wage increases alongside price deflation in order to make the state long-term viable for most people to live.  Anything short of that will only increase homelessness and despair, which is already a huge problem right now in CA.  It's no wonder many people I know from my home state of CA have now moved to Texas (which has no income tax and a lower cost of living) and seem to be enjoying that decision tremendously.

MplsP said:

For all the people mocking QC, they have a long history and a lot of experience in processor design, so they're not exactly 'new' to the game.

Ultimately, though, if they want to build a desktop-class processor, they need to have an OS to run on it. Microsoft has not shown any will to make ARM processors a viable alternative for windows. until they do, any non-x86 chip will be fighting with one hand behind its back.