http://www.techradar.com/news/computing ... rs-1139128

Are there problems with the power demands or the capability of mobile processors? While the latest phones seem to be more powerful, they must be reaching the limits of what the eyes can handle with screens. The resolution of the Galaxy S4 is well above what the eye can identify so unless it is going to be used to stream to HD TV's are such processors necessary? I know my iPhone 5 has had a speed bump from the previous version but are these really essential? I guess that it makes the phones etc run far more smoothly but unless you have more screen estate any excess could be redundant. I guess I will find out in a couple of years when the new apps will either gobble up all the resources on my then elderly phone. I can see the benefits of efficiency as that extends battery life.

No real mention of performance, other than the graphics core. They need to really boost performance, especially if they are going to appear next year. The current generation Atom is faster and has a similar battery life and the version due out later this year should double performance, without drastically altering battery efficiency.

If that is the case, nVidia are really going to have to pull something out of the bag.

Improved graphics performance might help for a portable gaming device, but for a general tablet or smartphone, you are going to need raw processing power and energy efficiency. For most people, 3D gaming performance comes way down the list.

I agree about the 3D gaming point. Though is there a problem with lack of processing power for phones? Efficiency is good because it means better battery life, though I wonder if I am even pushing my phone processor wise.

My phone stutters at times because the processor can't handle multi-tasking very well.

It's a year old now, but it cost over £500 so it's not being replaced any time soon! At the time it was supposed to be the best you could get, but now it's considered obsolete. I would really appreciate the higher screen resolution of newer models too...

Some of the “apps” in the pipeline will use the extra power – things like better voice recognition esp if they keep on pushing the real time translation – that will need if done on the phone a lot of “horse power”

Games is another area that can always use extra power – not just graphics but better AI etc

The trend seems to be to push that sort of processing into the cloud, rather than do it on the actual device. There's always going to be more grunt up there than in your hand. Err.. as it were.


Indeed, games will use as much horsepower as you can throw at them, in general. However I think the equation needs to be tipped more away from horse power and into battery efficiency. I'd be happy with a mobile phone that was as powerful as the mid-range now is - which is what, dual core 1.5GHz about? That's as powerful as my laptop - that also had a battery life of a week instead of 1-2 days.

I think what will happen is that because it is in reality an Android vs iOS battle neither will want to be shut out so they will go for both power and efficiency, rather than towards just efficiency.

I expect that streaming is just shunting data to a device (or inner processor) in the TV which actually does the horsepower of playing it back. All the phone would need to do is ensure a datastream that allows buffering. This appears to be how the Apple TV works, and I expect it’s how all the other devices work too. The processor speed is less important here than the speed of the connection. The phone is effectively a remote data storage device or (in the case on online streaming) a relay for the downloading data. Unless the phone is expected to downsample the video, which seems odd to me. I would expect the box connected to the TV (or embedded processors) to do that.

The screen on my phone is exactly the same resolution as the screen on my TV.

That was the situation I was thinking of when phone resolution is at 1080p and the same as many HD TV's. It does not need any additional processing power. It only needs to beam it to a video box of some kind.

Though do most people concern themselves with the technical specs of a phone when they buy it? I suspect that most only really look at whether it is a good looking phone and does what they want. For me the only thing worth considering was available memory for the apps. Processor did not feature at all. I new that it was going to have a speed bump over the previous version but what it was, was irrelevant for me.