Mashable has a piece on the speed of the newest smartphones, comparing the iPhone 5 vs. the Samsung S Galaxy III… the headline is on how the iPhone is faster, but man, the real point is all these phones are FAST! (I’m having problems understanding from Mashable piece where the original source of this image is, but I think it’s here.)
Assuming I’m understanding this geekbench point system correctly, the current smartphone batch is about 1/2 as fast as actual laptops were from 2008/2009! This is an amazing amount of processing power in your pocket.
September 19th, 2012 at 5:50 am
How did they measure the speed of the new Apple device?
It is difficult to understand how or why it is better, since the article from Business Insider doesn’t explain how the benchmark was made…
But, yes, you are totally right, the point is that phones are getting amazingly fast, and that it won’t stop soon.
September 19th, 2012 at 10:24 am
I think, but can’t confirm, that they used the geekbench analysis to clock these phones: http://www.primatelabs.com/geekbench/
September 19th, 2012 at 10:53 am
Hey Healy! Moore’s Law is incredible! I took a look at Geekbench, and would still be curious about their assumptions on which applications were consuming the processing resources. I would think that relative performance would vary quite a bit depending on whether one is utilizing fixed versus floating point calculators and the level of parallelization (is that a word?) inherent in the application.
September 24th, 2012 at 5:02 am
I also think it is more a side effect of Moore’s law, that we need to prove that everything needs to be faster and faster, at all costs.
For the user, those tiny differences don’t make any difference. Their interest is elsewhere.
September 24th, 2012 at 4:33 pm
Brian, yes, you are totally right, who knows that “faster” really means. But I still am in awe of how much computing power is in these devices, and love they way it’s growing so fast – a la Moore.
September 24th, 2012 at 4:34 pm
I would agree, that the end user really doesn’t care so much in practice… but they do like the fact that they are running complicated apps on their phones.