Watching this video, it doesn’t seem very much more than a demo for a rather anonymous-looking little touchscreen device, a PMP prototype maybe. Then you find out that the whole thing is running an 8-bit processor with 4KB of RAM. Touchscreen tricks like scrolling momentum are implemented perfectly well, and there appears to be little or no lag. Pac-Man runs at 60fps, which is more than I can say for the version on my G1.
The touchscreen is salvaged from an off-brand PMP, and the CPU is a 12Mhz Atmega644 — not something I’m familiar with, but I trust the author when he says it’s about 3% of the speed of an iPhone. And it’ll render a polyhedron (though I doubt it can texture it).
The question this brings up for me is why aren’t all interfaces so snappy at this point? I understand there’s more going on under the hood in a smartphone than in a demo application like this thing, but seriously, I’m going to have lag when I hit the home button on a CPU faster than the one I had in my PC a few years ago? Make it better.
[via MAKE]
I am impressed that this is on 8bit setup.
Does it have an os overhead or is this pure embedded C stuff? or maybe even lower level than that?
doesn’t look like it, I’m guessing it’s all just a graphics engine running off the SD card.
The Pac man thing looks unimpressive, just for the fact that for all we know (all I know anyway) it might as well be a recorded video.
However I really do think its bullshit that the iPhone 3G is as laggy as it is. I shouldn’t have to upgrade to the 3GS to get what I was advertised for the 3G.
but Steve said you should.
this reminds me of BeOS back when apple had the six sided rotating picture album with different pictures on every face, so Be made the rotating cube with 6 different movies on every face. oh how I miss BeOS. why didn’t Palm do something with it? not to start a flame war, but Be makes so much sense for a mobile low power multimedia platform.
Things are laggy these days because coders these days would rather solve a software problem by throwing more resources at a problem than write more efficient code. This may be the result of project managers preferring more features than better code performance.
Code these days is just too bloated.
One or both of two things are going on with your laggy iPhone:
(1) the display has lots of memory and a dedicated controller – “smart backpack” if you will. A 5 inch touch-screen LCD like this retails in unit quantity for around $50. A LOT less in iPhone quantity.
If your iPhone is laggy, it may be because Apple decided to line their pockets with more of your money by using a “dumb” display, which is cheaper. They “offload” the “smart” aspects and memory of the dedicated LCD’s “backpack” onto the main micro-controller or processor.
(2) If your iPhone is laggy, and the LCD has a “smart” backpack with memory and controller, then the iPhone programmers are lazy and/or are not using an efficient programming tool-chain.
Either-way, the outcome is not good. There is no reason a device that sells for $600 should be laggy in its operation other than poor design, laziness and/or greed.