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So why is my iPhone 4S then much brighter than my 3GS?:confused:
Stronger backlight (so more light). Use the exact same setting brightness on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4S (so both just as bright), than you'll find out that the iPhone 4S' display uses more energy.
 
Stronger backlight (so more light). Use the exact same setting brightness on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4S (so both just as bright), than you'll find out that the iPhone 4S' display uses more energy.

It's not that straightforward because the 3GS display is TN which by its nature uses less electricity than the IPS technology used in iPhone 4/4S display at the same brightness.
 
It's not that straightforward because the 3GS display is TN which by its nature uses less electricity than the IPS technology used in iPhone 4/4S display at the same brightness.
Sure. A 480 by 320 display (3GS) vs a 480 by 320 IPS display, than the 3GS would be slightly brighter. In the case of the iPhone 4, however, there are also four times as many pixels so the 3GS is definitely brighter. To achieve the same brightness, the backlight must be slightly stronger.
 
I'm sure Apple, as well as any app developer worth its salt, has already taken all these worries into consideration.
 
Sure. A 480 by 320 display (3GS) vs a 480 by 320 IPS display, than the 3GS would be slightly brighter. In the case of the iPhone 4, however, there are also four times as many pixels so the 3GS is definitely brighter. To achieve the same brightness, the backlight must be slightly stronger.
The latest generation high-resolution screens have a higher aperture ratio and are more efficient than their low-res predecssors.
 
If anyone is still convinced that a crappy 3gs screen is brighter than a 4/4s screen, go argue with the numbers: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/5

The iPhone 4 screen was ~20% BRIGHTER than the 3GS. Why does the 3GS "appear" brighter? Because on a 3GS, black is *4x* brighter. In other words, display an all-white screen on both and the 4/4S is significantly brighter. Display an all-black screen and the 3GS will make a decent torch.

If you like your blacks to be as bright as possible, stick with the 3GS ;)
 
yes

Haha I think the only real problem if the iPad goes Retina is that games with HD retina compatibility would require more power from the GPU, thus leading to laggy gameplay.

Real life example: iPhone 3GS playing Modern combat 2. No lag whatsoever
iPhone 4 playing Modern Combat 2 and 3: Lag occurs when there are smoke and explosions or even when there are a lot of players on screen during multiplayer.

Why did the iPhone 4 lag? Because Apple chose to use the same old GPU that was in the 3GS to power twice* as many pixels. Result equals lag. Heck even Infinity Blade 2 lags a bit on my iPhone 4!

I do hope Apple sticks a better GPU into the iPad 3. :rolleyes:

Yes I agree and I'd say: more ram please: 512mb is ridiculous. Angry Birds constantly froze on my iPad2 even after their company tweaked the game to work with iOS 5.

I may hold out for the iPad4. Not using the remaining iPad2 we have at the house and the longer I wait, the better chance the software I do use will finally be made into apps. The less I have around the better. My computer habits are dramatically changing: don't need one at home just work.
 
I'm waiting for an iPad 3 but I won't be standing in a line on day 1. Instead I plan to wait and see what all the reviews say when it comes out. I have a feeling the reviews will cover a few minor considerations like screen resolution, brightness, speed compared to a 2, battery life. After seeing those reviews, then I'll decide if the price point is to my liking. In the meantime, I'll just keep grinning at all the speculation and build up my cashback bonus so I'll have it if I do decide to get one...

... but it won't be on day 1.
 
The display will be darker and not as bright like comparing the 3GS to Iphone 4.

Also the Ipad 1 cost more so if it goes retina I think it will be £450 at launch and Ipad 2 sticking around at £369 as an entry model.

iPhone 4 (much less 4S) is several orders of magnitude better than 3GS. Nothing that they "lost" matters. They're better phones.

Same about iPad.
 
Yes I agree and I'd say: more ram please: 512mb is ridiculous. Angry Birds constantly froze on my iPad2 even after their company tweaked the game to work with iOS 5.

I may hold out for the iPad4. Not using the remaining iPad2 we have at the house and the longer I wait, the better chance the software I do use will finally be made into apps. The less I have around the better. My computer habits are dramatically changing: don't need one at home just work.

If a pretty simple game like angry birds is freezing, it either means you have a problem of some kind with your iPad or the angry birds developers are pretty incompetent at memory management (I don't play it, so no comment).

512MB is actually a hell of a lot unless you're working on something really high end. (Put it this way, the xbox 360 also has 512MB, do you think that would struggle with angry birds? :))
 
In terms of processing power, the retina display will only affect games. Displaying most common apps takes little processing power of the GPU. Same as with desktop PC's: my netbook has no problems whatsoever driving my 2560x1440 display. It's games we should worry about.


Not perse if they lower the transistor size (which they will).

Depends entirely on whether the apps will be run at native resolution. Also, the next gen processor will be more powerful to compensate a little.
 
Just looked at the new Ipad 3 that a friend of my brother related to his sister in law that knows a guy in housekeeping at the building next to Apple who said......
 
The way this works is a bit weird - the cost of a chip is mostly based on the size of the chip. You're right, it'll need a new GPU to drive the screen, and the new GPU will be bigger than the current one. It'll likely have a new CPU too, which will make it even bigger. That means more expensive. On the other hand, they'll likely move the chip to a new 'process', which can make the same chip smaller than the old process. Basically all the tiny parts that make up the chip get shrunk. End result: the new chip might be the same size as the old one and use the same amount of power - despite it being faster and more powerful and containing more parts.

The cost of the chip is dependent on the quantity. That's why it doesn't matter that the A5 is around 120mm2 on a 45nm lithography (16.7 x 14.3 package).

If the A6 is based on 32nm or 28nm, all the innards will be smaller, thanks to the wonders of miniaturization.

Expect the A6 to be smaller and be competitive with the chip used in the PS Vita, unless they pull out a Hail Mary SoC based on the ARM Cortex-A15 and PowerVR Series 6 GPU block (highly unlikely for a early 2012 design though).

Right now I expect either a faster clocked dual-core or quad-core Cortex-A9 coupled with ImgTec SGX543MP4 at 250Mhz or SGX543MP2 clocked at 500Mhz.
 
I'm thinking it'll be dual core.

If it goes retina, they'll need to seriously increase the GPU power (which will end up as the exact same GPU the Vita has if they double it up to an SGX543MP4). That makes the chip bigger and more power hungry. Moving to a smaller process will make it smaller and more efficient to balance that, but I suspect not enough to allow them to double both GPU and CPU without it eating through the battery a bit too fast (or getting a bit too hot).

Besides that, the benefit of quad core might not be enough to justify the change at this stage. Not many apps will take advantage of it. I doubt many even use both cores in the A5, but at least with dual core background system stuff like email checking isn't interrupting the app you're running.
 
I'm thinking it'll be dual core.

If it goes retina, they'll need to seriously increase the GPU power (which will end up as the exact same GPU the Vita has if they double it up to an SGX543MP4). That makes the chip bigger and more power hungry. Moving to a smaller process will make it smaller and more efficient to balance that, but I suspect not enough to allow them to double both GPU and CPU without it eating through the battery a bit too fast (or getting a bit too hot).

Besides that, the benefit of quad core might not be enough to justify the change at this stage. Not many apps will take advantage of it. I doubt many even use both cores in the A5, but at least with dual core background system stuff like email checking isn't interrupting the app you're running.

This may come as a bombshell to you but the current A5 can easily drive a 2048 x 1536 display, it is way over designed, in such a fashion I think Apple would have gone Retina display if it weren't for the lack of displays.
They do not need a SGX543MP4 part at all, they could simply clock the MP2 part higher to gain the same performance as the PS Vita. Not that they need it.

45 nm to 32nm / 28 nm is nearly two full generation nodes (28 nm is two generations), so they could add anything they wanted and still make a smaller SoC than the current A5, while using less power. A Cortex-A9 core is tiny.

A Quad-core Cortex-A9 does not use twice the power due to power-gating.

Multi-core is basically handled by the OS and the APIs are freely available to developers.
 
This may come as a bombshell to you but the current A5 can easily drive a 2048 x 1536 display, it is way over designed, in such a fashion I think Apple would have gone Retina display if it weren't for the lack of displays.
They do not need a SGX543MP4 part at all, they could simply clock the MP2 part higher to gain the same performance as the PS Vita. Not that they need it.

45 nm to 32nm / 28 nm is nearly two full generation nodes (28 nm is two generations), so they could add anything they wanted and still make a smaller SoC than the current A5, while using less power. A Cortex-A9 core is tiny.

A Quad-core Cortex-A9 does not use twice the power due to power-gating.

Multi-core is basically handled by the OS and the APIs are freely available to developers.

It's not much of a bombshell - I'm an iOS developer and I specialise in realtime graphics ;)

The A5 will drive a display with 4x more pixels for many apps yes, but for some it would seriously kill performance. Even if the app runs at 1024x768, after rendering it still has to blit the image to screen - and it has 4x more pixels to draw at that point. One of my own iPad apps pushes the SGX right to the limit - that extra blitting workload would push it over 100%, which means it would slow down - and it's a video recording app, slowing down means dropping frames, which is unacceptable.

A clock speed increase would obviously fix that. The final screen blit isn't a heavy job, I bet even a 10% increase would be enough. But even so, if they've increased camera quality (which they're rumoured to have done) I'll likely have to increase the internal rendering resolution (which is currently 1280x720, it would presumably go to 1920x1080 - over 2x more pixels). A clock speed increase won't be enough (they could push clock speed a bit higher but not double it without heat issues I suspect).

On the multicore stuff: yes, there are APIs available. It's not that simple though, you also have to design your application for parallel processing. For some jobs it's simple enough, for others it's very difficult. As a result, many developers don't actually do it at all - it's single threaded all the way. Also, a quad core processor DOES use more power when it's fully active. That would be rare of course, but still it's something they have to allow for.

You can argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin till the cows come home but the latest rumor on the front page seem to indicate it is gonna be a quad core A6. Looks solid.
https://www.macrumors.com/2012/02/0...-details-of-ipad-3-with-quad-core-a6-and-lte/

I'm not at all sure about those shots and the rumour. The photos looks reasonably legit, although they'd be easy enough to fake - but there's no indication I can see of it being quad core. There's a bit where it mentions 4 chips, but they're clearly marked as NAND - that would be the flash storage, not the processors. Also, look at the part numbers. The A4 was a 930X, the A5 with a big jump to dual core and new GPU was a 940X. The new part is listed as a 945X - that seems to imply it's a minor bump rather than a major change. A smaller, lower power chip? A faster version of the A5 with a bit more GPU or CPU power? Who knows, we'll find out soon enough.

One thing that I did notice on those screenshots: it shows the memory! 244,276 pages free, plus 839something used. The page size is 4KB, so that adds up to roughly 1GB. (And if they faked this, then they a) really know what they're doing, and b) went into great detail ;))
 
Problem if iPad 3 goes Retina....Retina isn't even a technical term. It's just a marketing term to make all the non-tech folks go ohh-la-la.

Yeah, we have "possible" numbers, but for all we know, retina could be 1280x1024, 1280x800, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2048x1152, 2560x1600..and the list goes on.

Sure, there could be many performance implications of Apple goes to high, but come on. Apple will surely compensate one way or another. I think the real trouble will be old apps looking like poop on a new screen if it is nearly double the resolution in x & y. Ahh the traumas of native resolutions. And people ask me why I still game on a 24" CRT. Because I can change resolutions without making the game look like poop! You guys ever install a pre iPhone 4 app on the iPad? It will be even worse if we double the resolution of the iPad2.

I mostly use my iPad2 for reading and browsing. I would welcome an increase in resolution to allow text to become crisp and clear since text is always scalable. Luckily, I can see pretty small text but when it gets too small on the iPad2, you know it just gets fuzzy and there is nothing AA could ever do about it since you are now down to the limitations of the pixel size.
 
The A5 will drive a display with 4x more pixels for many apps yes, but for some it would seriously kill performance. Even if the app runs at 1024x768, after rendering it still has to blit the image to screen - and it has 4x more pixels to draw at that point. One of my own iPad apps pushes the SGX right to the limit - that extra blitting workload would push it over 100%, which means it would slow down - and it's a video recording app, slowing down means dropping frames, which is unacceptable.
If other SoCs are any indication then there's bound to be a scaler in the display pipeline (particularly useful for video playback). Thus upscaling would be free in terms of bandwidth and GPU cycles as it happens during framebuffer scanout. There's just a small chip area cost.
 
If you really want to find "problems" with the retina display it'd be that apps will take up more space to support it and developers will need to reprogram their products.
 
If other SoCs are any indication then there's bound to be a scaler in the display pipeline (particularly useful for video playback). Thus upscaling would be free in terms of bandwidth and GPU cycles as it happens during framebuffer scanout. There's just a small chip area cost.

Yes, but that would mean you can't support any high-res graphics. You'd have to render *everything* in the lower resolution. Also, I'm not sure this even applies - I'm pretty sure iOS just renders everything into a screen-sized openGL surface before sending it to the screen, so it'll still be drawing all those pixels.
 
If you really want to find "problems" with the retina display it'd be that apps will take up more space to support it and developers will need to reprogram their products.

iPad apps already seem to take up a ton of space... Oh joy
 
Yes, but that would mean you can't support any high-res graphics. You'd have to render *everything* in the lower resolution. Also, I'm not sure this even applies - I'm pretty sure iOS just renders everything into a screen-sized openGL surface before sending it to the screen, so it'll still be drawing all those pixels.
Even if that's the case now it could change in the future.

You could use CALayers with different scale factors to render some elements at higher resolution than others. Display pipelines usually support multiple overlay surfaces, so it's not something that would be terribly hard to do.
 
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