Apple A8 and A8X

4k on a phone screen is completely stupid though, you actually CAN'T see all the pixels (without a magnifying glass at least.) Even 1440P is too high rez. Here's hoping 4k phones NEVER happen, but knowing tech companies and their desperate hunt for "market differentiators" and spec bulletpoints, of course it will... :p
 
4k on a phone screen is completely stupid though, you actually CAN'T see all the pixels (without a magnifying glass at least.) Even 1440P is too high rez. Here's hoping 4k phones NEVER happen, but knowing tech companies and their desperate hunt for "market differentiators" and spec bulletpoints, of course it will... :p

I don't think it's all that clear-cut. There are phenomena like hyperacuity that can justify very high definitions, but even without that, contrast matters.

You can see really, really tiny things provided they are bright enough against a dark background. E.g.: stars.

Sirus has a diameter of 2,434,250 km and is some 81,356,000,000,000 km away from us.

That's like a 0.24 mm object seen from 8.1 meters away. Yet it is the brightest star in the night sky. It is, of course, very very very very bright and set against a very dark background, but you get the point.

Besides, Oculus Rift!
 
Besides, Oculus Rift!
This is the reason.

Not that I care about HMDs, but we need the mainstream technology to improve beyond what's reasonable so other technologies can benefit from it.

And also: the idea of a 5" 4K display is just plain cool.
 
I don't think it's all that clear-cut. There are phenomena like hyperacuity that can justify very high definitions, but even without that, contrast matters.
Stars are merely point objects. They could have no diameter at all and as long as they send out light you could still see them as a dot in the sky. They're NOT a good argument for 4k displays on phones, where such a display just draws pointless, wasted power for no benefit to the user whatsoever.

Oculus rift is another matter entirely, first and foremost because it isn't a phone. :p
 
Stars are merely point objects. They could have no diameter at all and as long as they send out light you could still see them as a dot in the sky. They're NOT a good argument for 4k displays on phones, where such a display just draws pointless, wasted power for no benefit to the user whatsoever.

Oculus rift is another matter entirely, first and foremost because it isn't a phone. :p

Small bright objects against dark backgrounds can exist in games that you might play on a phone, or in complex data representations, and probably other things I can't think of right now.

Naturally, if you only use your phone to make calls, read emails and occasionally browse the web, you'll get no benefit from 4K.

As for the Rift, it's not a phone but it couldn't exist if smartphones had not made small, high-definition displays affordable. And unless HMDs take off in a big way, they will remain dependent on phone technology for the foreseeable future.
 
Well the guy acknowledges that the screen of the iPhone 4 is really good, he also acknowledges that jumping to 600DPi would make a tiny difference and that paper printing is an order of magnitude better.
Imo that is hair splitting, displays have a lot more serious issues than resolutions, thing is it seems that fixing those issues is tough whereas useless (if not counter productive for power consumption, game/3d performances, etc.) increase in resolution are in our (technological) reach and easily marketable: most of the people that owns high DPI phones will ever read the articles you just posted nor care about it.

The only good reason, a really good one, to increase DPI is marketing related. Apple may have to do it.
Another good one, though lesser, is to keep the instal based of iphone consistent wrt to "on screen" performances, it is a side effect of the above point but increase in GPU perfs are eaten away uselessly but it allows the park of devices (so including older ones) to look pretty homogeneous.
 
He also outlines what "good enough" actually means and what retina is not good enough for. Second link sums it up very nicely.
 
He also outlines what "good enough" actually means and what retina is not good enough for. Second link sums it up very nicely.
Not good enough for what, it clearly state that real paper printing is far far away.
I could spend hours splitting hair about his take of ink property... a lot of it has to do with paper properties, criticizing Apple PR material is fine.

For a lot of the tests and eyes accuracy he is speaking about he does not indicate under which circumstances the eyes reach that accuracy, I mean eyes+brain are meant to deal with a lot more informations than what is available on ~4inch screen held more or less at arm length from the eye, imo that a quite limited use of what our brain+eyes can achieve.

The second link is about gaming on PC and consoles which happen in completely different conditions with suckier screen in every way and in condition closer to more optimal eyes+brain natural usage.
 
Well the guy acknowledges that the screen of the iPhone 4 is really good, he also acknowledges that jumping to 600DPi would make a tiny difference and that paper printing is an order of magnitude better.

Printed paper resolution is usually 1-bit per color component and relies on dithering to give the appearance of more varied color intensity. You can't compare that with a display that's nominally 8-bits per component or better (or at least 6-bits)
 
The on-screen test has less overhead than the off-screen, both in memory usage and raw rendering performance required for the workload. It's marginal, but certainly measurable and non-negligible.

I am just curious Rys but why exactly is this the case? Why should there be a non-negligible difference as long as the resolution is the same?

Edit: Also..bringing the discussion back to the SoCs..I've read elsewhere that the next gen is also a dual SoC strategy but with the A9 on Samsung 14FF and the A9X on TSMC 16FF(+?). Thoughts?
 
The offscreen workload has an extra downsampling blit per frame, to copy the frame into the onscreen mosaic, which gets drawn every 100 frames. So there's more GPU memory in play, more memory bandwidth needed and more GPU cycles per frame.
 
The offscreen workload has an extra downsampling blit per frame, to copy the frame into the onscreen mosaic, which gets drawn every 100 frames. So there's more GPU memory in play, more memory bandwidth needed and more GPU cycles per frame.
Ahh ok..got it. Thanks!
 
Mostly to avoid v-sync in the future for GPUs that can run the workload faster than the v-sync rate, so the benchmark still has some utility over time.
 
Off topic again ;) but I really like this i6. The display is very nice and the resolution is certainly enough for me :) Love the slo-mo video feature and the camera seems to be very good too.
Somewhat surprising is how well the battery holds up, I've just started to charge at 17% and the last full one was yesterday morning. Interesting how the biggest draw is by social apps, and Google Hangouts - which we use at work for communication - is really really bad, I hope the big G will look into improving it.
I can type better on the larger screen but still not completely error free. At least it's now big enough for two thumbs, the 4S was never really working well that way for me.

Also, it looks really nice in real life, much better than any of the pictures.
 
Just picked up a 6P after the 64 GB model became available at an AT&T store near my house.

Only real misgiving is that the A9 SOC will probably have 2 GB of RAM in the 6S and 6S Plus later this year.

But I've gotten used to the limitations so this will hold me for 1-2 years.
 
I got hold of both an iP6 and iP6+ for about a month.

At first I liked the iP6 better, then iP6+ took over because of the larger screen and better battery life.

I was surprised I could carry both in the same pocket. Their profiles are thin enough.

The 6+ is almost too thin to handle. I have dry hands. At times, it feels like the phone might just slip out of my hands.

So in the end, I stick with the iP6+ and then upgraded my iPad mini to an iPad Air 2.
 
I ordered a clear snap on case, just to offer some more resistance to bending.

Yeah it seems too thin and slippery to use without a case.

Even in landscape mode though, iP6+ still doesn't show as much content in Safari or Mail as my iPad mini 2, which I'll keep for travel, since it's unlocked.

iPhone 5S for the gym though there is a nice clip on case which is suppose to fit the iP6+ for running.
 
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