The AnandTech Podcast: Episode 26

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• teiglin - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link

  I'm glad you guys mentioned the argument that plugging in all cores and locking them to their max frequences is just mitigation for the joke of a DVFS implementation that they have (because why would you want to check frequency more often than every ten million cycles?). Have you guys had any conversations with hardware vendors about this? Have Qualcomm, ARM, or Apple even tried to implement any kind of turbo?
  
  It seems that there's a huge competitive advantage here. Admittedly Intel and AMD have been working on their Turbo Boost/Core for a long time now, so I don't really imagine it's a simple problem, but why aren't they even trying?
  
  It also makes me think of the crappy advertising of mobile core frequencies--when Intel sells you a 1.6GHz Core i5, you expect it to run at 1.6GHz most of the time, and hit up to 2.6GHz or whatever when there's thermal headroom available. But when you get a 1.9GHz APQ8064AB, you know it will mostly run at 1-1.2GHz because the phone just can't disspiate the heat generated by 1.2V at 1.9GHz. I would love to see the SoC designers and integrators held accountable for their TDPs and give realistic estimates of operating frequencies.

• dylan522p - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link

  You know intel is even advertising the boost on Atom as actual clock because all the Arm guys are.

• Wade_Jensen - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link

  I'm sorry you copped so much crap for the note 3 review Brian, especially for how hard you must've worked to push out all three, people should've trusted you and Anand and had something in the works for benchmarkgate.
  
  Thanks for your hard work and I really look forward to battery life and "lapablility" tests for Surface Pro 2 from you.

• OzedStarfish - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link

  Yeah I'm also interested in Brian's thoughts on the Surface Pro, as he was an old school tablet user. I'll be waiting for broadwell to get one as my Nexus 7 is somewhat filling the gap between desktop and phone, but it doesn't serve my need for a stylus.

• BMNify - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link

  Brian is a windows hater, so not expecting much from him, heck he didn't even review the Lumia 920 and even 1020 review seems forgotten. And he has himself professed that he hardly used Surface 1st gen products, so its quite clear that he doesn't care much about those products.
  
  I hope Anand reviews both Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 , Anand can objectively review even the platforms which he doesn't use ignoring even his emotional feelings, a true Zen master :)

• Peanutsrevenge - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link

  Still no ads either start or end?
  
  Just to say, I'm quite happy to have an ad or two if you'd like to put them in guys. Much prefer that than the most important tech site on the net start to struggle financially.

• Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link

  I appreciate the vote of support :)

• BMNify - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link

  one or two Ads will be fine Anand, Anyways we are listening for 1-2 Hours, a few seconds Ad won't do any harm :)

• Krysto - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link

  Is it possible Apple optimized for all of your benchmarks, too? How did they achieve almost a 2x increase in CPU performance WITHOUT increasing the clock speed from last year (well no more than 100 Mhz).
  
  Seems pretty unlikely. Could there be a similar thing they're doing, where they activate a "turbo-boost" of the chip only for benchmarks?

• Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link

  The same way Intel was able to get a > 2x increase in performance from Clover Trail+ to Bay Trail increase IPC. Frequency scaling isn't the only option.
  
  A few things:
  
  1) I know for a fact that we run some things that Apple doesn't
  
  2) A lot of what I used to characterize A7's performance isn't publicly available.
  
  3) I do believe there is some optimization going on with the browser tests, at least the common ones (this also applies to Chrome/Android). WebXPRT I don't believe has been an optimization target, and this speaks to what I wrote about earlier where we need to keep all of our benchmarks a moving target.