Samsung Galaxy S5 Announced

[Ebenesh]

IP67 certificated and bigger battery with the black and white power save mode has sparked my interest. I was happy with the S4 specs as is, but wanted an IP rating for water like the Sony and Sammy Active had. I guess I have found my next mobile.

The removable back and battery still push me towards this though. Shame the HTC two or one2 or whatever it is called looks better. S5,not the best looking phone but practical, I am fine with that.

 

But it doesnt have to sacrifice !

[LAwLz]

Even then... Apple isn't really doing anything too exceptional. Sure, they threw in a 64-bit OS into a small phone, big deal. It doesn't have enough RAM to fully encase the advantages of a 64-bit architecture anyways. The main advantage between 32bit and 64 bit is how they handle the RAM. 32-bit doesn't like anything over 3 Gigabytes and the 5S has 1 Gigabyte. Sure, there are a few other advantages I'm missing but I don't understand the need for 64-bit right now. The only reason they did it was to say that they did it first. (imo)

Please... PLEASE do some research before saying stuff like that. There are huge advantages to 64bit OSes on ARM processors. It's not just "more RAM", it's much higher performance as well because of new and more registries (as well as make them wider).

The move to 64bit alone will give us a ~20% performance increase, or even more (if we are talking about the new crypto instructions then we will see performance increase by several hundred percent.

I don't get where this "the only benefit to 64bit is more RAM" idea comes from. It's not true on x86, and it's even less true on ARM.

 

The whole "you can only use 3GB of RAM on 32bit" is not true either. You can address 4GBs (including all memory, not just RAM) in regular mode, and if you use PAE you can address 64GB in 32bit mode.

[Toxiclegend]

But it doesnt have to sacrifice !

It doesn't my colleague was so excited for the S5 release now he's not a very happy person, he said he is more than happy with his S4 but won't buy the S5 if he wants to waterproof it he'll just buy a case for his S4

 

The S5 should have been a lot more than what it is. They even said about a new design but hey.

[Ebenesh]

It doesn't my colleague was so excited for the S5 release now he's not a very happy person, he said he is more than happy with his S4 but won't buy the S5 if he wants to waterproof it he'll just buy a case for his S4

The S5 should have been a lot more than what it is. They even said about a new design but hey.

I have an S4 and a nexus 4. Though the nexus 4 isn't as powerful and not expandable still looks much better than the S4 and I kinda use the nexus more often.

[CCap]

Please... PLEASE do some research before saying stuff like that. There are huge advantages to 64bit OSes on ARM processors. It's not just "more RAM", it's much higher performance as well because of new and more registries (as well as make them wider).

The move to 64bit alone will give us a ~20% performance increase, or even more (if we are talking about the new crypto instructions then we will see performance increase by several hundred percent.

I don't get where this "the only benefit to 64bit is more RAM" idea comes from. It's not true on x86, and it's even less true on ARM.

 

The whole "you can only use 3GB of RAM on 32bit" is not true either. You can address 4GBs (including all memory, not just RAM) in regular mode, and if you use PAE you can address 64GB in 32bit mode.

I never realized there was that much of a difference between the two... The only thing that I had ever been taught about the differences was how they utilized memory, and I sure as hell didn't know that it was different with mobile processors. I'll have to do a ton more research. (obviously) Thank you for bringing this to my attention. 

[Nineshadow]

I never realized there was that much of a difference between the two... The only thing that I had ever been taught about the differences was how they utilized memory, and I sure as hell didn't know that it was different with mobile processors. I'll have to do a ton more research. (obviously) Thank you for bringing this to my attention. 

It really all comes down to wires.

In digital circuits, only 0's and 1's (usually low voltage and high voltage) can be transmitted from one element (CPU) to another element (memory chip). If I have only 1 wire, I can only send either a 1 or a 0 over the wire per clock cycle. This means I can only address 2 bytes (assuming byte addressing, and that entire addresses are transmitted in just 1 cycle for speed!).

If I have 2 wires, I can address 4 bytes. Because I can send: (0, 0), (0, 1), (1, 0), or (1, 1) over the two wires. So basically it's 2 to the power of # of wires.

So if I have 32 wires, I can address 4 GB, and if I have 64 wires, I can address a lot more.

 

There are other tricks that engineers can do to address a larger address space than the wires allow for. E.g. splitting up the address into two parts and sending one half in the first cycle and the second half on the next cycle. But that means that your memory interface will be half as fast.

 

Processors contains registers that it uses as "scratch space" for storing the results of its computations. A CPU only knows how to do simple arithmetic and knows how to move data around. Naturally, the size of these registers are the same width in bits as the "#-bits" of architecture it is, so a 32-bit CPU's registers will be 32-bits wide, and 64-bit CPU's registers will be 64-bits wide.

There will be exceptions to this when it comes to floating point (to handle double precision) or other SIMD instructions (single-instruction, multiple data commands). The CPU loads and saves the data to and from the main memory (the RAM). Since the CPU also uses these registers to compute memory addresses (physical and virtual), the amount of memory that it can address is also the same as the width of its registers. There are some CPUs that handles address computation with special extended registers, but those I would call "after thoughts" added after engineers realize they needed it.

 

At the moment 64-bits is quite a lot for addressing real physical memory. Most 64-bit CPUs will omit quite a few wires when it comes to wiring up the CPU to the memory due to practicality. It won't make sense to use up precious motherboard real estate to run wires that will always have 0's. Not to mention in order to have the max amount of RAM with today's DIMM density would require 4 billion dimm slots.

Other than the increased amount of memory, 64-bit processors offer faster computation for integer numbers larger than 2^32.

 

Previously programmers (or compilers, which are also programmed by programmers)  would have to simulate having a 64-bit register by taking up two 32-bit registers and handling any overflow situations. But on 64-bit CPUs it would be handled by the CPU itself.

 

The drawback is that a 64-bit CPU (with everything equal) would consume more power than a 32-bit CPU just due to (roughly) twice the amount of circuitry needed. However, in reality you will never get equal comparison because newer CPUs will be manufactured in newer silicon processes that have less power leakage, allow you to cram more circuit in the same die size, etc. But 64-bit architectures would consume twice as much memory.

[Toxiclegend]

I have an S4 and a nexus 4. Though the nexus 4 isn't as powerful and not expandable still looks much better than the S4 and I kinda use the nexus more often.

That kinda of says it all for Samsung, so I don't get why people are still buying them in the masses.

[LAwLz]

I never realized there was that much of a difference between the two... The only thing that I had ever been taught about the differences was how they utilized memory, and I sure as hell didn't know that it was different with mobile processors. I'll have to do a ton more research. (obviously) Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

It's alright. You are far from the only one that has made that assumption. I am not sure where that piece of misinformation comes from. If you want a good article about the improvements then Anandtech ran some benchmarks proving it in their iPhone 5S review.

-snip-

I'd just like to add that not registries are the same width. For example ARMv7 has 64bit wide FP registers and now with ARMv8 that goes up to 128bits.

The number of registered is also increasing (for example ARMv7 has 16 FP registries and ARMv8 has 32) which will help performance because you can do more parallel (or even specular) computations.

Programs doesn't take up double the memory either. Certain parts like ints pointers etc will take up double the space, but programmers can just manually set them to 32bit if they want. Even if they don't the program will still only grow by maybe ~20% on average. So yeah 64bit does use more memory, but it's not really a big deal. Also, the performance increase is well worth it.

Another thing that's important to remember is race to idle. By finishing a job quickly and going back to idle, you can save power in the long run compared to using a lower power chip that needs more time to do the same thing. So even if the move to 64bit will make CPUs use a bit more power than if they had stayed 32bit,the higher performance will translate to longer overall batter (more time spent idiling).

Personally, the lack of an ARMv8 chip in the Galaxy S 5 is the biggest reason why I am disappointed. I couldn't care less about how it looks like a bandaid, or how it has a gimmicky heart rate monitor. The fact that it still uses the same SoC as the Nexus 5,LG G2, Note 3 etc, only slightly higher clocked, kills it for me. We are so close to a huge leap in performance with the release of Cortex A57 and other ARMv8 CPUs.

If the HTC M8 uses the Snapdragon 801 then I am going to be pissed. Please HTC, at least use the Snapdragon 805.at least that has a new GPU as well as support for hardware accelerated HEVC decoding.

I have an S4 and a nexus 4. Though the nexus 4 isn't as powerful and not expandable still looks much better than the S4 and I kinda use the nexus more often.

The Nexus 5 is actually quite a lot more powerful (than the standard i9505 model) than the Galaxy S 4. If you got the LTE-A model (aka the i9506) then performance wise it's the same as the Nexus 5.

The Nexus 5 is a much newer phone though so it's not really a surprise that it's better.

[snes]

They could have - at the very least - gotten rid of the tacky chromed plastic. I guess, I won't get to upgrade my phone for the 3rd year in a row.

[Ebenesh]

That kinda of says it all for Samsung, so I don't get why people are still buying them in the masses.

Same reason I got it.... We think fast is GOOD !!

 

But the S4 is the perfect phone for my mom. She wanted an iPhone but we thought she should have the S4 instead.

 

*She uses her phones for 5 years at least and mostly changes it cos the battery dies.

*She is old and would benefit from a large screen

*Battery is pretty good in it and she doesn't have to worry about charging it all the time.

*As all older folk taking pictures is a big deal. #no need for a separate camera. Really good quality pics.

*She breaks the back cover, hell we can get that fixed

*She thinks the flip cover is so cool ! 

 

Basically u see all the advantages of that phone

[Ebenesh]

The Nexus 5 is actually quite a lot more powerful (than the standard i9505 model) than the Galaxy S 4. If you got the LTE-A model (aka the i9506) then performance wise it's the same as the Nexus 5.

The Nexus 5 is a much newer phone though so it's not really a surprise that it's better.

 

Dude! Battery !!! I can never get through a day with a NEXUS. I carry a battery around for the Nexus 4. But it's worth it