CaedenV
Splendid
- Jun 14, 2011
- 4,829
- 3
- 23,465
The interesting thing that I think we are seeing with phone tech and the OS tech of win8/wp8/android/iOS is that there is a much more delicate balance between hardware and software than what we saw during the development of the PC. PC development started out as an extensions race of who had the best instruction sets. That later evolved into a mhz race, and then a core count race, and is now a watt/ips race. Each new dialectic showed us that there are different ways of gaining speed and efficiency from a device, and now we know all of this in the mobile phone era and we see lots of different companies taking very different approaches. Intel is championing the instruction set circuit (x86 has several more instruction options than ARM, which is why it can do more work per clock), nVidia is taking the multicore route of having 5 cores, others are taking a GPU offload approach, while others are focusing solely on wattage (even at the expense of performance).
Then on the software side we see Android trying to fill the traditional swiss army knife 'do anything' OS which can almost do anything, but no single thing extremely quickly. Apple has the 'wait and do' attitude of pausing everything to get the most responsive end user performance. MS took the 'throw the baby out with the bath water' approach of stripping out everything possible to have the lightest weight OS, and then slowly fill features back in.
Anywho, all these different platforms, all these different approaches, but during the desktop wars we saw only 2 companies with 2 platforms battle it out using the same general approach at the same time. Now during the cell phone wars it is much more difficult to make direct comparisons, or see what is most effective, because each processor, and each OS is simply so very different from each-other. The more interesting thing to me is that with the desktop space we saw a doubling of performance every ~2 years. In the cell phone world we are seeing nearly 2x performance gains every single year, and sometimes more than that. It is pretty neat to watch, but it really makes articles like this difficult to parse because it is hard to tell what is being referred to in each and every benchmark or situation.
Then on the software side we see Android trying to fill the traditional swiss army knife 'do anything' OS which can almost do anything, but no single thing extremely quickly. Apple has the 'wait and do' attitude of pausing everything to get the most responsive end user performance. MS took the 'throw the baby out with the bath water' approach of stripping out everything possible to have the lightest weight OS, and then slowly fill features back in.
Anywho, all these different platforms, all these different approaches, but during the desktop wars we saw only 2 companies with 2 platforms battle it out using the same general approach at the same time. Now during the cell phone wars it is much more difficult to make direct comparisons, or see what is most effective, because each processor, and each OS is simply so very different from each-other. The more interesting thing to me is that with the desktop space we saw a doubling of performance every ~2 years. In the cell phone world we are seeing nearly 2x performance gains every single year, and sometimes more than that. It is pretty neat to watch, but it really makes articles like this difficult to parse because it is hard to tell what is being referred to in each and every benchmark or situation.
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