@LewsTherin that's not normally what I think of when someone says they're "running out of space" -- that usually means low on disk space, not low on places to put new disks in the chassis
@Bob U.S. income tax refunds, for those of us who overpaid the prior year, are landing for people any day now; in fact I'm expecting mine, and it's going to be rather large
the active devices have weaker specs and lower battery life, which I consider unacceptable, even though the risk of certain types of damage is vastly reduced
@Bob Qualcomm CPUs are easy. for the S4 generation, which launched in approx 2011 and saw very incremental changes up through 2013, there are four variants: "Play", "Plus", "Pro", and "Prime". The latter is too high TDP to go into phones, but the remaining three are in phones depending on price and target market segment. Play sucks, Plus is okay, Pro is fast, and Prime is for tablets.
for the new (post-S4) generation, the model numbers range from the 200s (like the old Play), the 400s (like the old Plus), the 600s (like the old Pro), and the 800s (like the old Prime), except that the 800s are now going into smartphones because they have a lower TDP version that just fits within the TDP envelope of smartphone batteries
if the model number ends in a 0, it's a 2013 era; if it ends in a 1, it's a 2014 (April 2014, to be exact) era
so 801 is the fastest available Qualcomm SoC as of April 2014
that's why I really hoped they'd release the Droid Maxx worldwide
@Bob the Snapdragon 800 with the Adreno 330 GPU is faster than the Snapdragon S4 Pro with the Adreno 320. by how much I'm not sure, but the GPU should be about 50% faster, and the CPU runs at a higher clock and is slightly more energy hungry when fully engaged
one of the main reasons why the Droid Maxx has such a long-lasting battery is that they conservatively went with a Snapdragon S4 Pro, which is basically an underclocked 800 without 802.11ac and a slower GPU and less hardware decoding support (fewer media codecs)
so the CPU is a sipper compared to the 800 "guzzler"
@Bob Exynos is a different animal. it's a custom SoC built and tweaked by Samsung for their phones, and it has basically nothing to do with Qualcomm.
you can compare the performance and I'm sure there are benchmarks, but it's neither a newer nor older model of processor; it's just a different brand, per se
they are both based on the Cortex CPU designs from ARM, so CPU performance should be comparable.
but the real questions are in the other chipset functions (audio, GPU, memory, etc) performance deltas
more often the small devices advantage a lot from good GPU capablility, specially the high-res stuff. with the CPU they are seriously needing to address cooling issues.
@Bob here is what makes it the most complicated, in my eyes. the recent Exynos processors are "big.LITTLE" design, meaning they have a dual- or quad-core Cortex-A15 (blazing fast, basically, that's all you need to know about "A15"), and a dual or quad-core A7 (slow, basically, that's all you need to know about A7) at a much lower clock rate
none of the Qualcomm Snapdragon processors are big.LITTLE
all that quad stuff they put in my phone, when they upped the res to desktop reses, it still has the most trouble with the gpu. It does not choke on games, but less rediculous resolution the games would be more fluid.
Qualcomm licenses the core ARM architecture from ARM, but they don't license any specific CPU design at all; in other words, if you have Snapdragon, it's not based on ARM fab designs, just ARM "IP" -- the entire fab is designed by Qualcomm
Krait is an ARM-based central processing unit included in Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 and Snapdragon 400/600/800 (Krait 200, Krait 300 and Krait 400) System on chips. It was introduced in 2012 as a successor to the Scorpion CPU and has architectural similarities to ARM Cortex-A15.
Overview
* 11 stage integer pipeline with 3-way decode and 4-way out-of-order speculative issue superscalar execution
* Pipelined VFPv4 and 128-bit wide NEON (SIMD)
* 7 execution ports
* 4 KB + 4 KB direct mapped L0 cache
* 16 KB + 16 KB 4-way set associative L1 cache
* 1 MB 8-way set associative (dual-core) or 2 ...
Wiki claims it's similar to a Cortex-A15, but that doesn't mean the performance is going to be the same
I think that battery technology is advancing slowly enough, and power consumption is advancing fast enough, that companies like Samsung and Motorola need to co-release a special model of phone alongside their others that comes optimized for extremely long battery life, at the willful expense of performance
for the current gen, that would look something like: Snapdragon 801 that has been intentionally underclocked; LTE chip optimized for low power; and 720p screen (not 1080p; too energy-intensive)
@Bob I know, right? well, the CPU is ceasing to be the primary contributor to power consumption when the phone is mostly idle
the real killers are mobile data and the screen (especially 1080p screens)
@Bob everything about the 600 smacks of lower power consumption, because all the clocks are lower. that's a great thing if you want battery life, but they probably tanked the battery capacity along with it :/
most Exynos procs have Mali graphics, which if I recall correctly is an ARM IP, but Qualcomm's Adreno has long been recognized as the fastest GPU product line on mobile
> if I were to pick a winner, the octa-core seems to have a slight edge on performance while the S600 has a slight edge on battery efficiency . Quite ironic since the Big.Little configuration (octa-core) is used to provide battery efficiency... yet the S600 has better results on battery life
@Bob you know what really tickles me about the Adreno? anagram of Radeon. it was bought by Qualcomm from ATI last decade. so when you run Adreno, you're running a GPU design with a legacy of coming from ATI, which IMHO makes the best GPUs in the world for graphics (note I didn't say anything about GPGPU xD)
and not surprisingly, an IP based on years of ATI research soundly beats these n00b upstarts like Mali and PowerVR :)
@allquixotic Seems like the Nexus 5 has better specs, but worse battery life. And the battery isn't user replaceable, which would do well as a tiebreaker for me :P
> Qualcomm said in a statement, "The recently released Nvidia Tegra K1 benchmark scores on an unreleased All-in-One desktop platform are generated without taking into consideration any thermal constraints of a mobile environment.
@Bob everyone can be their own weatherman! :D
next up: crowd-sourced weather
currently near you, 50 people report a barometer of...
honestly, although all these new SoCs coming out claim extraordinary performance like "50x faster than Tegra 2" etc, for the things I do with my phone (tethering, web browsing, email), even the rendering performance in browsers is fast enough for me, on my Snapdragon S4 Pro with Adreno 320 graphics
until I got my Droid Maxx, I couldn't say to you with a straight face, "my phone is plenty fast enough"
Cons: I wish they'd have paid me another $80,000 or so to do this review...."
@Bob several, but it depends on the firmware, which is pretty manufacturer-dependent. also, doesn't the S4 have a Snapdragon in the US (Verizon and AT&T) and an Exynos for all you people with 20th century cellular networks? ;-)
> The majority of users will likely miss the TouchWiz advancements Samsung has implemented in its software package - the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink camera app, the 50 gigs from Dropbox, the smart gestures, Adapt sound, Air View, Direct Call, the list goes on and on into eternity.
Me looking at that list: Meh, why, nope, wtf, wtf, wtf
Whats with them going back to Soft buttons with the new phones? i hated soft buttons back when my device didnt have real buttons, and they had to lay in an extra screen space wasting chunk in to "fix" it. now i hear mention if that being a great feature.
Well it makes sound and , err it vibrates, and it uses the accelerometer, and err, well its not a GUI, but then again it isnt a TUI, but its isnt an OS??? It is a . . . copy paste from the samsung site, that'll fix it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchwiz Oh, It is a bunch of the usual apps, added to the phone, with a central interface, and some skin changes.
@LewsTherin Me and "enclosures" is a trip to the dremmel (to put in air movement holes) at least that one has a metal case. the metal can be less insulative than plastic. For that price with the biggest complaints being what you can see from the pics. it looks ok.
Is also USB power dependant, i failed to notice. not a problem, but a concideration.
Is there a way to figure out which user and/or which computer is remotely accessing my computer's Windows event log files? These accesses are locking applications on the local computer and thereby preventing their deletion.
This access is showing up in ProcessExplorer as a TCP connection from mm...
This was my weirdest and most useless passive cooling of an enclosure to date.
Chimneys, using convection heat flow (heat rises) to try and get the media chips in ther to cool out and work for longer. It is an old 3.5 PATA media box, with older media chips, and nothing I did for cooling it , fixed the minor but inconvienient problem it had.
They had some holes, but most are blocked by the components in it, you can see how the drive itself rests against the plastic.
superuser.com/questions/729176/… ""My pc has no WiFi card so I use my phone by connecting it by USB and going into setting, more networks, Tethering and portable hotspot then selecting USB tethering. "" Stuff like this should be saved for Wireless blogs and computer convention speeches.