Neural network spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 silicon brain

Re:Neural network spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 si... by viraptor on Tuesday August 23, 2016 @03:01AM (#12341902)

I think you either misread my comment or missed the point of it. Overall tests matter, specific tests matter, unittests matter, microbenchmarks matter, user experience matters, perceived performance matters. But they don't always intersect.

Bringing up user experience when talking about branch predictors is meaningless. Just as bringing up branch predictors when talking about perceived performance. (unless you're proving that this exact feature being available/not available, with other things being controlled for, makes a major difference in the test)

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Re:Neural network spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 si... by zmb_ on Tuesday August 23, 2016 @04:43AM (#12342254)

> Bringing up user experience when talking about branch predictors is meaningless.

If working on branch predictors does not impact the user experience, then arguably that work is meaningless in the context of building real products -- it may still be interesting for academic purposes.

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Re:Neural network spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 si... by fasouto on Tuesday August 23, 2016 @07:05AM (#12342739)

Branch predictors made the phones faster and this affects the user experience. But if you want to test the performance of branch predictors you have to compare similar things, you cannot benchmark two different OS and apps because you get and OS and app test not an processor test.

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Re:Neural network spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 si... by woliveirajr on Tuesday August 23, 2016 @09:20AM (#12343464)

I think the point that previous posters were making is that in controlled environments some features might outperform others. And yes, the scientific way of testing things is isolating variables and changing one thing each time.

But, for the final user, it doesn't matter if each technology alone is better than another. If you have a background 64-core processor, driven by another 8-core... What matters is how fast something loads, performs, and how long batteries last.

Of course, this might be outplaced in a thread discussing NN branch prediction.

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