iPhone 4 "gyroscope"

#21 Man I am going to have to look into this. The must be some type of miniature ring laser gyros in it. The last time I deal with RLG was in the F16's I dont think they would be able to fit those in the iPhone. (There is no way it could be a spinning mass gyro (F4 days) ).

Anybody have links to what it uses?

#22 likely the use the same gyro technology used as in the wii mote plus addons, which are easily small enough for an iphone.

until the iphone 4 though is out we won't know it cause apple hardly never talks about hardware so the real devices + dissection is required

#23 Yes, that is true about Apple, they only seem to release partial specs. I wonder why they do that? There is amazing technology in the new iPhone, so you'd think they would talk more about it.

#24 I guess competition. Wanting to keep some secrets for themself. As a beginner in programming overall, what would a regular developer be able to gain from apple releasing better specs?

#25 Actually, quite a lot. I know in the PC world, NVidia and ATI (AMD) tended to release very detailed specs of their upcoming GPUs to the major games developers months before the release of their chips. This allowed the developers to target their games and scale them accordingly, already having a very good idea of what the final platform would look like. It's all about time to market, money, money, and more money (profits). At then end of the day, that is all that drives them/us.

It's still early days in the mobile computing world, but it seems fairly obvious to me that the same trend that we saw in PCs over the last decade will probably repeat itself again in the mobile arena. Mobile games will always be yrs behind consoles and PCs, but the differences will shrink over time, and we'll probably end up with GPU wars between competing companies (maybe Apple versus someone, or maybe Apple will be out of the picture by them, who knows, and who cares?).

History has a history of repeating itself.

#26 I also think that Apple don't want us to "abandon" the existing device market - until Apple says it's okay to leave these old devices behind. Can you imagines if Apple said that the new iPhone4 GPU is twice as fast as the old one and ships umpteen shaders etc etc There will be a whole slew of game ports that push the new hardware - meanwhile the "old" customers just look on. As Marc says ... we will know soon enough when somebody "cracks" open the new A4 chip. Personally I hope it is bl**dy fast and that all the 2G/3G iphone users upgrade - that way we'll all have games running at decent speeds and GG wont have to improve performance anytime soon ;-)

I see SJ said that he'd like us all to ship with enhanced 960x480 gfx ... how does a regular iPhone cocoa app know to load the new stuff if we can't do device detection?

#27 Very interesting guys.
Thanks.


feel free to drop more thoughts on the subject if you have them.


Ren

#28 mobile years behind desktop?
Don't know.
I guess you are aware that Intel GMA500 GPU = 3GS GPU = SGX 535? ;)

#29 Marc, I wasn't aware of that. Mobile devices are becoming very powerful that's true. I was thinking more of the really high end GPU cards that cost several hundred dollars, but I'm expecting a lot of exciting things to happen with mobile devices over the next few yrs, and in my opinion this is definitely the area to be in right now.

I can see a time when the mobile hardware becomes more open like the PC, and perhaps we'll see devices with very high speed interface ports (like a miniature PCI Express) in the future. That could potentially create a whole new industry with companies producing small peripherals that fit into a small slot, like a microSD flash slot or something similar. Think how cool it would be if we could add new memory chips, or even add a new GPU, just like we can do now with the PC. It would generate so much money it's gotta happen sometime soon.

#30 The higher end hardware is clearly out of range.
But not because mobiles are bad or alike. Thats more related to space and especially energy constraints.

If we look at the current SGX (SGX 545) we see that we basically have a DX10.1 gpu with great performance and fillrate for mobile devices up to ipad resolution (unlike the really used SGX 535 which is underspeced on the fillrate for resolutions larger than the iphone 3GS) which should for example be capable to kill several Intel GPUs in use today.

For fairness one needs to say that intel always was focusing on a very similar usage cases as Imagination Technology with their GPU: Low energy cost, low space usage. Reason behind this is that Intels GPUs are primarily targeted at notebooks, netbooks and small desktop boxes / kiosks. They never targeted the gamers market for example (larabee potentially could have become one but they pulled out with that architecture before we got to know it)