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Exclusive: Google Pixel 9 processor won't be the ambitious chip we hoped for
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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Android
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I've been running a galaxy S9 for years and have never run into a bottleneck with it.
Why do y'all keep needing more and more power packed into your phones? It doesn't make any sense to me.
"Why do you guys simply believe things should get better?"
That is how I read this. More power, more efficiency, better tech is not a bad thing to want.
Just because you want to hold on to a 5 year old phone doesn't mean someone else doesn't at least want to see efficiency in our pockets get better for the value we spend on them.
Imagine if someone said, I have dial up internet. Why are you guys constantly wanting faster Internet speeds.
It's okay to want things to get better. You should not have the mentality of, "it's just good enough."
How is this better value? I have a S9+, still full day battery and runs everything.
How is buying a new phone 'value'. What value does this bring exactly? You bring up dialup as a compassion. Well, modern connections don't tie up the phone line and are magnitudes faster (my Internet is 17,857x faster than dialup).
What tangible thing has been added to Mobile phones in the last 5 years? 10 years? What real value. Pretty sure my phone has more features than any 'modern' new phone.
The big reason is that you're choosing to spend several hundred dollars to put your still perfectly performant phone in a land fill so you can have a percentage or two more performance.
Your dial up comparison is not really a fair comparison, either. The S9 is not dialup in comparison to Samsung's new galaxy phones. You'd have to go down to like a BlackBerry or a Nokia flip phone to have that comparison make sense.
Let's compare the S9 to the S23.
The S23 has Wi-Fi 6E support, Bluetooth 5.3 support, twice as much base storage and RAM, 5G support, an in display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, 3 high resolution cameras, 120hz refresh rate, twice as fast internal storage, a 33% larger battery, a much newer version of Android and to top it off a processor that's roughly 3X as powerful as the S9.
So to me it might not be fair to call the S9 dialup but I would say a comparison between broadband and fiber is pretty accurate. At the very least the other features are worth upgrading for if not the speed. Now I suppose the S9 is still a perfectly good phone to be used as just a phone but these things are really portable computers and the increase in processing power becomes tremendous in a short period of time.
I think its more about the power efficiency. Samsung's exynos line as well as their few latest samsung foundry nodes are not known for being very power efficient, so I think people were holding for the Pixel 9 with a custom TSMC manufactured chip in hopes of it consuming less power and outputting less heat
I need more FPS in Honky Star Rail.
More seriously, I do a lot of emulation on my phone. I've kind of tapped out myself too though where the increases aren't enough to enable me to play anything new. But I can see that being a reason.
I have a pixel 6 and a OnePlus 7 pro. Between the two of them, the OnePlus runs games much better. That is with a snapdragon 855.
I'm looking forward to upgrading to a better phone for gaming.
That said, the pixel phones right now just don't hold up against snapdragon 8 Gen 2, etc.
Because I wanted a foldy boi.
That said, I plan on hanging on to my Z Fold 3 for at least the next half decade.
Pokemon go chugged on that thing. I ran it alongside my oneplus 8 for a while, and I promise it wasn't running perfectly.
Nevermind that the oneplus 8 ran at 50% higher fps.
Wait until the new iPhone kills the mobile gaming market. It's probably going to be more powerful than the switch 2. Slap on a backbone controller or a dock and you don't need a game console at all.
The current gen android stuff is also pretty capable but nobody makes games that aren't gacha trash for android.
Pushing the leading edge of phone design opens new use cases, it's not always just about "doing the same shit, slightly faster"
Your smart fridge is more powerful than the Switch but that doesn't prevent Nintendo from selling Switches.
Unless Apple ships a controller grip with their phone, Apple will never compete with gaming handhelds.
The shit pushed to Android is the same shit pushed to iOS. You can get excellent games like Rollercoaster Tycoon (the original one), GTA, Fortnite, PUBG, the list goes on, all from good old Google Play.
Performance isn't what's keeping phones from taking over the gaming market; control schemes and competitors are.
I think the biggest issue is titles; what people expect of mobile games, perpetuating itself into a weak catalog of original titles, with a few good ports. Mobile games are largely designed to be heavily-monitized, Games as a Service, and/or gacha titles.. profitable design choices, but not because they make games better.
Having a more standard control scheme would help get more ports of console games, but I'd love to see more mobile games that use the existing interface/formfactor well. Pokemon Go circa 2018 was a good game that only works on mobile, and I'd love to see more of those.
Plenty of enjoyable classics run in emulators on midrange phones. I was actually quite excited for the Android Switch emulator that used the fact the Switch is just a weird Android tablet to its advantage, which would let games run at near-native speed or even faster, but they got DMCA'd to death.
People make gacha games because hundreds of millions of people are paying serious money for them. They're not the only option, though. Better games are available and play just fine, people just don't want to play them on their phones. RPGs like Genshin, interactive multiplayer games like Roblox and Fortnite, In China and some other Asian areas, mobile gaming (as in, gaming, not the weird loading bar simulators with microtransactions) is actually very popular, to the point that there are specifically PUBG Mobile eSports matches.
As for games on phones, games like Mini Metro, Super Hexagon work very well on phones, even better than on desktops in my opinion. Card games (Heartstone, Marvel Snap) work very well on tablets. Various fitness-oriented apps also exist that can't work on any other platform (except maybe on smart watches?). I've also tried a bunch of puzzle games that can only work on handhelds because they required turning the phone or moving around the room.
You need to look beyond the most popular games on the Google Play frontpage, but if you scroll down a bit past the shitty cashgrabs, there are some real gems you can play on mobile phones.
You bring up an interesting point, and now I'm wondering: how would a gaming-focused phone sell in a post-Switch world? We all remember the Xperia Play, but maybe it was just too early. What if Apple released an "Arcade edition" of the next iPhone for $1000, which featured a slide out controller or some other slick integration of physical controls? How well would that sell, and what impact (if any) would it have on Switch/Steam Deck sales?
I mean, Asus and nubia have been making a gaming-specific phone for many generations now. Razer even gave it a try back in 2018, but I don’t think they released any follow up devices.
Lenovo also made a couple devices, but announced earlier this year that they’d be discontinuing their gaming phone business.
There seems to be a fan base and market for gaming-specific phones, but given Lenovo and Razer got out of the game and the fact that you haven’t seemed to have heard of any of these devices/product lines: my guess is that they are super niche.
I appreciate the links and examples, but none of those has physical gaming controls like I was suggesting. Obviously high end hardware is important in a device like this, but the physical controls were my key point.
I hear you, and fair enough, but I think the fact that none of these gaming-specific phones has physical controls like you described built in speaks to how impractical that ask is.
And I think it’s important to note: there’s weren’t just powerful phones (in fact, many of them seemed to get bested by other phones in more benchmarks than they won), they were specifically marketed and sold as gaming phones; that was the specific niche that Asus, Lenovo, Razer, and others all sought to fill. Despite that, and despite basically all those companies having a ton of general experience building gaming hardware of one sort or another, none of them thought it was a good idea to include physical input methods on-device. They pretty much all have accessories that turn it into something looking akin to a Switch or DS, but none had them baked into the actual phone.
And I honestly think that makes a lot of sense. Thumb sticks aren’t super pocket-able, and I feel like even if they could be made to fit into a pocket, sliding them in and out of bags and pants over and over would make them fail faster. And while A/B/X/Y buttons might be more reasonable on that pocket-ability metric, do you want to smush them (or thumb sticks, for that matter) against your face while you take a call?
While current controller-esque buttons and thumb sticks remain the primary input method for games, I really don’t see gaming phones including those input methods within their physical form factor. It might be a limitation of my imagination, but I just can’t envision how one would make that work (and it seems I am not alone in that).
Have you thought about why Switch is the best selling console in the current generation even though it's by far the weakest in performance?
The cheapest entry price with the most expensive ongoing cost?
Obviously it's because people are stupid.
Even Apple has to abide by the laws of physics. 3nm is fast, but a small, tightly packed, passively cooled device containing a large, heat generating element powered by a another large, heat generating element is unlikely to outperform a well ventilated, actively cooled device that is able to draw power from an outlet.
This is of couse ignoring the Apple reality distortion field, which in recent memory has succesfully perpetuated the idea that a tiny photo sensor can outperform a large one.
Nintendo is fighting the same forces of physics and they're beating every other mobile platform so far. Switches still sell great depite their CPU and GPU be in the equivalent of a five year old Android tablet.
Apple is making huge steps in chip design that has giants like AMD and Intel beat. AMD still has better chips half a year after the release of a new M series, but Intel has basically given up on being power efficient. Everyone else is just playing catchup to Apple. AMD and Nvidia are beating the shit out of Apple in GPU performance but for day to day use, Apple's hardware accelerated media engine and TPU are great at hiding their lacking GPU.
What Apple does lack is I/O. The base iPhone 15 still has USB 2.0 speeds and the M1 Macbooks couldn't even drive two screens. That's where the competition is still ahead in a wag Apple can't mask with a proprietary accelerator.
Luckily, Apple doesn't care for silly things like games and enforces their own look onto the world, creating a great market for competitors to operate in. They sell their laptop replacement iPads with stupidly gimped software that prevents them from ever replacing laptops. They demand high app store premiums to scare away any serious games publisher. They gimp their browser and forbid proper terminal emulators just to piss off developers. They take the revolutionary HoloLens concept and turn it into an iPad you strap to your face.
Apple could crush the Switch if they wanted to. Their hardware is powerful enough and their designers are smart enough not to create a Pippin 2.0. They just don't care about power users, gaming, and every other market they don't bother to compete in.
We've been hearing about Apple coming back to the gaming market for quite a long time now and absolutely nothing happens. The iPhone 15 isn't going to change anything in this regard, it's going to be a party trick with a handful of popular games ported to it and then nothing else.
Don't forget when the games disappear from the stores in the future.
I won't ever forget you Infinity Blade games!
The performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 GPU is already about 10-20% faster than the A16 chip, depending on the benchmark.
Even if Qualcomm only gives the Gen 3 a 10% performance increase, that is enough to beat or even surpass the A17 in gpu performance (rumors suggest something closer to a 30% increase). The Gen 2 already outcompetes the A16 in GPU power consumption and efficiency as well. This may change with the A17 since it’s on TSMC’s 3N node, however this node has been having issues which is why TSMC introduced the 3NE and 3NP so we will have to wait for power usage numbers from the A17 to see.
Overall I’m disappointed with the improvements between the A16 and A17. 10% on the CPU and 20% on the GPU (due to have 20% more cores) doesn’t seem like the type of upgrade I would expect from switching nodes. Hopefully next year they can do more with the improved N3 nodes. I’m also getting the feeling that Apple is trying to deploy more complex transformer models on their devices which is why we are seeing such a focus on the NPU.
I think you hit on the main point which is that nobody will pour money into developing for android. Apple also has the ability to make deals with companies with Capcom and Ubisoft to ensure games come to their platforms. I can’t see Google doing this since they already “tried” and failed to have a AAA mobile gaming platform with stadia. The only other company with enough motivation and money to bring big games to android is Samsung, but their mobile chips aren’t doing too well (despite their RDNA 2 architecture making it easier to port games).
Steam could step in with a proton layer if they wanted to. Android is technically linux already and the newest snapdragon stuff is comparable to the steam deck in raw power.
We're ripe for some multiplatform shenanigans.
Unfortunately, Valve would also have to build a CPU translation layer (Like Rosetta 2) since games run on x86 architectures and snapdragon uses an ARM architecture. The steam deck uses a Zen 2 CPU architecture which is already x86 so there would be little motivation on their part to do this. Currently proton uses wine to convert windows api calls into linux calls. The big thing Proton does is allowing games that use DirectX to run on Vulkan which is natively supported in Linux. So unless Valve makes the Steam Deck 2 with ARM or another company decides to make an x86 to ARM translation layer, then I don't see something like Proton coming to android any time soon.
The base already exists, wine is leveraging qemu for the cpu arch emulation and already has the windows translation layer.
I don't expect them to actually do it, but it would be on the same scale of a project as the proton project that's worked so well for the with the deck.
Maybe epic will do it to get a real deck competitor online, not that I trust those jackals to do it right.
It's about creating new shit that runs at the same speed.