Smart phones these days
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A smart phone now a days has way less power consumption than what a Pentium at the turn of the century had yet the amount of computing power and memory of the former is ten fold greater then of the later. How can that be explained. Why does the smart phone OS work with less juice? The resolution is the same or better so that should count in favor of greater power consumption. On the other hand there are no drivers and less hardware resources to listen to on mobiles.
In some ways, what you're asking has the same answer as comparing any older technology to a newer technology. At one end of the spectrum we find:
Quote:
ENIAC weighed 30 tons, covered 1,500 square feet of floor space, used over 17,000 vacuum tubes (five times more than any previous device), 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, and 6,000 manual switches, consumed 174,000 watts of power, and cost about $500,000.
And at the other end of the spectrum we find smart phones, SBC's like rPi's, heck, single chips that "do it all." Technological advancements are almost always about efficiency and performance, which then allows for innovation in products so we don't have to lug the 30 tons of an Eniac around to play Wordle. The more interesting question for me is, with all this computing power, why do we still complain about how long it takes for the computer to do what we want? :laugh: There must be something equivalent to a Moore's Law like "the more efficient the technology becomes, the less efficient the code will be utilizing the technology." :sigh: Or, if you prefer a "softer" version: "The more efficient the technology becomes, the more that will be demanded of it."
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A Lightweight Thread Safe In-Memory Keyed Generic Cache Collection Service A Dynamic Where Implementation for Entity Framework -
In some ways, what you're asking has the same answer as comparing any older technology to a newer technology. At one end of the spectrum we find:
Quote:
ENIAC weighed 30 tons, covered 1,500 square feet of floor space, used over 17,000 vacuum tubes (five times more than any previous device), 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, and 6,000 manual switches, consumed 174,000 watts of power, and cost about $500,000.
And at the other end of the spectrum we find smart phones, SBC's like rPi's, heck, single chips that "do it all." Technological advancements are almost always about efficiency and performance, which then allows for innovation in products so we don't have to lug the 30 tons of an Eniac around to play Wordle. The more interesting question for me is, with all this computing power, why do we still complain about how long it takes for the computer to do what we want? :laugh: There must be something equivalent to a Moore's Law like "the more efficient the technology becomes, the less efficient the code will be utilizing the technology." :sigh: Or, if you prefer a "softer" version: "The more efficient the technology becomes, the more that will be demanded of it."
Latest Articles:
A Lightweight Thread Safe In-Memory Keyed Generic Cache Collection Service A Dynamic Where Implementation for Entity FrameworkWhen I was very young I used to watch a TV series and read comic book series called Dick Tracey. He would talk into his watch to communicate with his associates. Back then I would never have imagined that that would be possible and now... Try doing something like that with an ENIAC strapped to your wrist. :)
Definition of a burocrate; Delegate, Take Credit, shift blame. PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.3.1 JaxCoder.com Latest Article: EventAggregator
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In some ways, what you're asking has the same answer as comparing any older technology to a newer technology. At one end of the spectrum we find:
Quote:
ENIAC weighed 30 tons, covered 1,500 square feet of floor space, used over 17,000 vacuum tubes (five times more than any previous device), 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, and 6,000 manual switches, consumed 174,000 watts of power, and cost about $500,000.
And at the other end of the spectrum we find smart phones, SBC's like rPi's, heck, single chips that "do it all." Technological advancements are almost always about efficiency and performance, which then allows for innovation in products so we don't have to lug the 30 tons of an Eniac around to play Wordle. The more interesting question for me is, with all this computing power, why do we still complain about how long it takes for the computer to do what we want? :laugh: There must be something equivalent to a Moore's Law like "the more efficient the technology becomes, the less efficient the code will be utilizing the technology." :sigh: Or, if you prefer a "softer" version: "The more efficient the technology becomes, the more that will be demanded of it."
Latest Articles:
A Lightweight Thread Safe In-Memory Keyed Generic Cache Collection Service A Dynamic Where Implementation for Entity Framework -
All smartphones use ARM processors, and even back in the pentium days, the ARM sales guys would happily demonstrate that they could run they processor using only the waste heat from a pentium ... If you generate heat in a chip, that's using power - and the more power, the more heat. ARM chips are very well designed to use low power and to waste less of what they do use, whereas the Pentiums were designed for brute force power. Add in that the Pentium machine code was (and still is) a horrendous mess compared the RISC ARM code and you get to do more with less! Then there is the OS: Windows is a big, heavy OS that evolved from a 16 bit command line only DOS to a fully GUI monster that needs loads of RAM, loads of SSD, and loads of threads to do anything, compared with Android / iOS which often struggles to do one thing at a time well :D
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
To say Windows today has evolved from the early DOS based products (1-3, 95) is not strictly true - Windows NT (which begat Windows XP, Vista, 7, etc) was a completely different codebase to the older 16 bit DOS based Windows for home use.
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When I was very young I used to watch a TV series and read comic book series called Dick Tracey. He would talk into his watch to communicate with his associates. Back then I would never have imagined that that would be possible and now... Try doing something like that with an ENIAC strapped to your wrist. :)
Definition of a burocrate; Delegate, Take Credit, shift blame. PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.3.1 JaxCoder.com Latest Article: EventAggregator
I'm reminded of Thackery (I think it was he), who wrote "They are making haste to build a telegraph line from Maine to Houston. But what can it be that Maine and Houston have to say to each other?" I prefer to talk to trees. They never argue, they just listen quietly and sympathetically with the occasional sigh, taking it all in.
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A smart phone now a days has way less power consumption than what a Pentium at the turn of the century had yet the amount of computing power and memory of the former is ten fold greater then of the later. How can that be explained. Why does the smart phone OS work with less juice? The resolution is the same or better so that should count in favor of greater power consumption. On the other hand there are no drivers and less hardware resources to listen to on mobiles.
My smartphone ruthlessly kills every application left in the background so it is super energy saver. I spend the spared energy and more instead of it. I hate when scrolled to content in the browser, left it alone, going back and it reloads the page, goes to top. I hate that I have yet to find an email client that has decent search capabilities AND works all the time. I hate when the energy-saving-maimed background processes fail to update my calendar so at first opportunity they sync nothing to my phone where originally I registered the appointment. I hate when the energy-saving-maimed clipboard loses everything a hour later. Productivity-wise a 2000's Pentium system is still lightyears ahead of anything mobile. Just there is no business in writing the software to be cramped into those systems, and there is no business in replacing the old HDDs with UFS SSDs. And there are digital nomads getting paid who "work" on mobile...
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All smartphones use ARM processors, and even back in the pentium days, the ARM sales guys would happily demonstrate that they could run they processor using only the waste heat from a pentium ... If you generate heat in a chip, that's using power - and the more power, the more heat. ARM chips are very well designed to use low power and to waste less of what they do use, whereas the Pentiums were designed for brute force power. Add in that the Pentium machine code was (and still is) a horrendous mess compared the RISC ARM code and you get to do more with less! Then there is the OS: Windows is a big, heavy OS that evolved from a 16 bit command line only DOS to a fully GUI monster that needs loads of RAM, loads of SSD, and loads of threads to do anything, compared with Android / iOS which often struggles to do one thing at a time well :D
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Add in that the Pentium machine code was (and still is) a horrendous mess compared the RISC ARM code and you get to do more with less!
Except when order of execution matters[[CLR - .NET Development for ARM Processors | Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2012/august/clr-net-development-for-arm-processors#running-on-arm)]. Then you fill your code with order pinning instructions, denying what ARM is. Or design a new CPU HW for it, like Apple did, and voila, you have decent x86/x64 emulation speed. But don't have an ARM CPU.
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A smart phone now a days has way less power consumption than what a Pentium at the turn of the century had yet the amount of computing power and memory of the former is ten fold greater then of the later. How can that be explained. Why does the smart phone OS work with less juice? The resolution is the same or better so that should count in favor of greater power consumption. On the other hand there are no drivers and less hardware resources to listen to on mobiles.
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I despise smart phones - looking at my iPhone 11 that has gone stupid.....
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Peter Adam and charlieg I’m not a fan of smartphones either. However smaller screen size helps against eye strain when you have to do something “on a computer” other then writing code ( browse the web, read and post comments on forums etc. )
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A smart phone now a days has way less power consumption than what a Pentium at the turn of the century had yet the amount of computing power and memory of the former is ten fold greater then of the later. How can that be explained. Why does the smart phone OS work with less juice? The resolution is the same or better so that should count in favor of greater power consumption. On the other hand there are no drivers and less hardware resources to listen to on mobiles.
I think it boils down to resistance, as in ohms. Shrinking the transistor didn't just mean packing more into a smaller space, it also meant much smaller bits of metal being involved. Physics translates that to meaning exponentially less energy to manipulate the gates. It'd materially be even better except that we've eaten up a bunch of the gains with bloated insane crap like js.
