Windows phone 8

Yeah, it's an attempt to compare the user experience of the current "top end" WP7 and Android phones.

What surprises me is that there are areas where my old LG WP7 is noticeably faster at loading stuff than the Lumia 900 in the test (and the S3 for that matter). Falls behind on the web browser of course, but considering that it's 2 years old in November it shows just how well WP7 has aged.

Kind of a shame that no-one gave a damn about it really.

Yea you have shown me something interesting with that info...it mirrors the pc with hdd vs solid state drives...the faster storage often proving the best upgrade for overall system speed than a new processor...

Would you be able to kit a s4 equipped mobo with that nand setup?...
 

Conceded but misleading. Android can actually run apps in the background wich makes some apps slower to load up the first time. You could see this in the Skype app wich doesnt run in the background on WP7. By rebooting first it made a difference. I understand he was trying to be fair but the very test itself is flawed since these are two different OS:es so might aswell pick a realistic user scenario. Most people reboot months at a time

What happens when i load an app like whatsapp is that it will always load the start screen first before going to my chat window. On Android i can close it and start it again and it will start exactly where i left it. Drastically faster
 
Is resolution having a large impact on load times?
donno, but heres a real example
ATM testing my 3.5" 960x640 screen game on a ipad3 9.7" 2048x1536 shows that the texture resources (2d stuff esp) can look like crap, thus I have to update some of them, typically 4x the size/memory. Thus longer loading times.
This is true of all platforms pc/console whatever. the larger the resolution the larger the texture resources you need.

Yes when playing video or 3d games...I don't think it would effect overall system speed too much.
of course it does, screen updating is not a null time operation, the more pixels that have to be updated == more memory operations that need to be done

From googling theres not many crossplatform benchmarks, I did manage to find this on anandtech
45457.png

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google nexus s = 1.ghz single core @ 800x480
 
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donno, but heres a real example
ATM testing my 3.5" 960x640 screen game on a ipad3 9.7" 2048x1536 shows that the texture resources (2d stuff esp) can look like crap, thus I have to update some of them, typically 4x the size/memory. Thus longer loading times.

Except in the apps in the video the phone UI was being used so there wasn't a custom super hi res bitmap based UI being used for everything. Infact, only a retard would use such a UI for a phone app of the types demonstrated. So why would resolution have a large impact on load times?

of course it does, screen updating is not a null time operation, the more pixels that have to be updated == more memory operations that need to be done

Unless those memory operations are being done in the flash storage why would they significantly impact loading time? And who the hell would write the framebuffer to the flash memory?

I can do all sorts of shit with transparent layers in windows phone and the framerate goes to hell but the loading time of the app doesn't appreciably change.

From googling theres not many crossplatform benchmarks, I did manage to find this on anandtech
45457.png

45458.png


google nexus s = 1.ghz single core @ 800x480

Neither of those benchmarks relate to anything AlphaWolf or french toast were talking about.
 
What happens when i load an app like whatsapp is that it will always load the start screen first before going to my chat window. On Android i can close it and start it again and it will start exactly where i left it.

On WP7 that's entirely down to how the developer chooses that the app should behave. You can make an app restart exactly where a user left it.
 
Yea you have shown me something interesting with that info...it mirrors the pc with hdd vs solid state drives...the faster storage often proving the best upgrade for overall system speed than a new processor...

Would you be able to kit a s4 equipped mobo with that nand setup?...

It could be that the Samsung phones have faster storage than my LG but lose out for some other reason (the camera app loads as fast on the S3 as my phone for example), but I think the interesting thing is that the Lumia 900 (which is overall a far better phone than mine) is so much slower at loading stuff despite its big CPU advantage.

I don't know why that is though. As you say with the PC, storage speed is commonly the bottleneck. In all the phone spec wars going on it seems this crucial area of performance is being overlooked. I think it's also safe to say that a phone OS that's more careful with what it loads and when could end up having some big performance advantages over one that isn't quite so careful, regardless of CPU, GPU and ram.
 
I don't know why that is though. As you say with the PC, storage speed is commonly the bottleneck. In all the phone spec wars going on it seems this crucial area of performance is being overlooked.
I remember reading Intel was very careful on its phone to get good flash memory performance. Too bad I can't find that any more :cry:
 
It could be that the Samsung phones have faster storage than my LG but lose out for some other reason (the camera app loads as fast on the S3 as my phone for example), but I think the interesting thing is that the Lumia 900 (which is overall a far better phone than mine) is so much slower at loading stuff despite its big CPU advantage.

I don't know why that is though. As you say with the PC, storage speed is commonly the bottleneck. In all the phone spec wars going on it seems this crucial area of performance is being overlooked. I think it's also safe to say that a phone OS that's more careful with what it loads and when could end up having some big performance advantages over one that isn't quite so careful, regardless of CPU, GPU and ram.

I think nvidia has utilised a high end flash storage device..I think I read it somewhere and posted it here a couple of months back...this plays out in some of the antutu memory benchmarks I think..but can't be sure.

Seems like a no brainer for system performance....another question..as you sound like some kind of developer..what impact..if any...would doubling the cache on say a dual core krait have of performance?..would you be able to utilise that somehow?
 
I remember reading Intel was very careful on its phone to get good flash memory performance. Too bad I can't find that any more :cry:

That seems like wise move - as my somewhat old and clunky WP7 shows a phone can feel snappier than those that actually have rather more power if it loads stuff quickly. It would go a long way to making the badge on Intel phones having value IMO.

Seems like a no brainer for system performance....another question..as you sound like some kind of developer..what impact..if any...would doubling the cache on say a dual core krait have of performance?..would you be able to utilise that somehow?

I'm not really a developer - I have some programming experience and I got a WP7 so I could muck around on it making apps for fun. There are some guys on here that really do know about computer architecture though and they'd be the people to ask about something like this.

From my rather limited perspective, I'd guess that a larger cache would allow you to use larger data structures (or work on larger subsections of data structures) without suffering as much of a main memory access penalty. It might also save some power as I image off chip data access is more power hungry. Most phone apps seem to be about presenting data to the user in a useful manner rather than then doing lots of number crunching though, so I guess the bottleneck would normally already be in loading and pulling data off some kind of web service, in which case the increased cache wouldn't really show itself off like it does in PC benchmarks.

I'd quite honestly encourage you to have a crack at making some simple phone apps yourself. It's great fun and with the internet as it is now there's never been a better time to start. You don't need to be an elite programmer to make something cool and enjoy yourself. The WP7 developer kit even has a pretty fine emulator so you can get started on that without even splashing out any money!
 
So why would resolution have a large impact on load times?
with 90+ % of apps, the first thing an app does is display a splash screen! (with IOS this is required, even the basic builtin apps have this, Im not sure with android or WP but Im sure its prolly the same)
this image doesnt magically appear instantly, it has to be pulled from the storage ergo when a screen has 2.4x the number of pixels for this basic operation it will be slower. then you start loading texture data etc, typically for a larger resolution this texture data will also be of larger size, surely this is obvious
 
But is that really going to have a noticable impact? Just to have a look I created a 1920x1080 file with a bunch of splash screens and saved with ms paint it's around 370kb. On phones you'll have a lower resolution and you could get away with more compression or stretching the image. I don't see how ~250kb is going to make much difference compared to a ~150kb file for a lower resolution device.
 
with 90+ % of apps, the first thing an app does is display a splash screen! (with IOS this is required, even the basic builtin apps have this, Im not sure with android or WP but Im sure its prolly the same)
this image doesnt magically appear instantly, it has to be pulled from the storage ergo when a screen has 2.4x the number of pixels for this basic operation it will be slower. then you start loading texture data etc, typically for a larger resolution this texture data will also be of larger size, surely this is obvious

The splash screen doesn't have to be at the device's native resolution and doesn't have to be a bitmap though, and as tongue_of_colicab says you're actually dealing with pretty small files for splash screens. Even if you did do some logic to check the device's native resolution then select a splash screen based on that you'd be looking at about a single frame worth of variance in load times, if that. And if a developer's splash screen *is* appreciably slowing down loading of their app then they're doing it wrong and should slap themself across the face as a wakeup call.

Having lots of splash screens would just increase the size of your app for no real benefit though so I doubt many developers would actually do it.

With textures for use in-app there's again no requirement to use higher resolution textures with a higher resolution device (one of the draws of a higher resolution device is to fit more on screen), and also no requirement to load all textures during app startup. This is besides the point though, as the apps in the video that show WP7 performing so well compared to the S3 aren't texture heavy so this wouldn't be why WP7 is doing so well there.
 
Well looks like that shadowy figure eldar murtizin..has been up to his old tricks again.

Apparently Nokia will release 2 wp8 handsets on September 5th...same design (awesome imo) just thinner, 4.7 screen on the phi with a micro sd card slot (awesome)...and 2 krait cores whistling away underneath..just imagine how fast wp will be with dual kraits? It runs silky smooth on far less powerfull hardware than that.

The 3 phones will be phi, atlas and arrow, apparently only 2 will launch on Sept 5th..with another US device launching shortly after.
http://www.mobot.net/nokia-phi-atlas-arrow-nokias-trio-wp-apollo-lumia-phones-46635

Interestingly there has been hints about pureview technology also near release...hopefully they are combined on Sept 5th.
 
Boo if the Phi launches only on AT&T. Looking for something carrier unlocked to use on T-Mobile, and also overseas.
 
Omfg, sd card support!
How will anyone ever catch up? Next thing they'll support real file system access and USB mounting of the phone's drive like palm did three years ago!

Revolutionary! ;)
 
Actually palm had micro/SD support, file system access and universal device search on the Treo in, what...2003/2004?

Back to the future with WP8!
 
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