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  • therealnickdanger - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    HSIC sounds like a great step forward and is likely going to require better performing storage. Just as modern SSDs have improved general computing for desktops and notebooks, it would be great to see some of that great random read/write performance trickle down to the SD card market. The best Class10 SD card might be able to push 22MB/sec sequential, but they're still abysmal in random performance. I notice hangs and delays all the time when doing lots of simultaneous operations on my Android phones, delays which could be greatly reduced or eliminated with some better storage (internal and external).
  • Tanclearas - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    This comment could pretty much go in any number of Anandtech articles that touch on "network speeds". This includes WiFi articles, but also most smartphone articles that discuss 4G/3G/3.5G.

    Bandwidth isn't the problem. The real problem is ridiculously large web pages. Anandtech is well over 1MB for the home page alone.

    If you want to "improve" network speeds, do your part.
  • name99 - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    Uhh. Just so you know, people use networks for more than just browsing web pages...

    Meanwhile, if the size of the AnandTech page continues to offend you, use this alternative:
    http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ana...
  • Tanclearas - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link

    Indeed. However, using tablets and smartphones, it is unlikely that you are transfering huge files. At 36Mbps, or even at mere 3G speeds, I have no issues at all watching streaming videos, or other network-related tasks typical of a tablet or smartphone.

    Anandtech isn't the only site that is bloated, and using the web shouldn't be an exercise in figuring out how to load a site by alternative means.
  • B3an - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link

    1MB+ for a site like this is more than acceptable with todays speeds. Especially with all the images, which are pretty much need being as people like to SEE what is being reviewed. To get it under 1MB the compression on the image would have to be so bad that the site would look like total shit.

    Go back to the 90's and reading plain text. Or just grow some fucking brain cells.
  • GoodGrief - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link

    That's the mindset that gets us the crap bloatware we see so often today. It's why we have multi-gigabyte <word processor applications>. It doesn't matter how fat your pipe is, a smaller piece of data will transfer quicker than a bigger one on the same pipe - ALWAYS. We can store more content with less space, send files faster, and perform more simultaneous transactions - without requiring more hardware. Responsible use of data is a win for everyone.

    So, let's talk about this specific article then. Not counting the site headers, and other shared assets, there's only two unique images.

    - One is a completely useless graphic that's a visual representation of the article headline. That one is for idiots like you who NEED a shiny, but pointless picture to stare at. It provides ZERO information, but it's 217 KB of data. The bandwidth spent loading that could've been used on something <useful>, but hey, they gotta' pander to the mouth-breathers that need shiny-but-useless pictures. :/

    - Even better is the second graphic. It's the graph. It's 44 KB of data. I can (and did) recreate that exact same graph image with some basic HTML, CSS, and a single SVG image - AND DO IT ALL in less than 8 KB of data (and I wasn't being terribly bit-conscious). That's a minimum of 36 KB of absolutely unnecessary data & wasted bandwidth - it won't even change the viewable content of the page. Not only that, the code is reusable, and they could template all their graphs with a tiny addition to what I did and save massive amounts of storage space and bandwidth that could be used on something else - and lose <nothing> in the process. Not only that, the graph "images" could be trivially indexed and searched by content, since the meaningful data would be entirely plaintext.

    So, before you nit-witted, mouth-breathing morons go firing off your mouths (figuratively speaking) in response to a perfectly legitimate call to make something more efficient, perhaps YOU should "grow some fucking braincells".
  • Tanclearas - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link

    Perhaps you should try leaving your house or city and travel around a little bit and realize that there are huge sections of the continent where you will end up on 2G networks. You're right. This isn't the 90's, but sadly you're are blissfully oblivious to the fact that high-speed networks are not available anywhere you want them to be.

    Perhaps you should go back to school for more practice reading text to remove your dependency on graphics.

    Perhaps you could even learn a little about web design and graphics and realize that getting the Anandtech page under 1MB wouldn't really be that hard at all (see the great post by GoodGrief). In addition to his comments, I would add that the Facebook Social plugin is a wonderfully useless chunk of data for the page. Also, how important is it really to see product shots for nearly every article summary?
  • alpha64 - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    Even in 5GHz, most mobile devices only support 20MHz channels with a single stream, resulting in 72Mbit PHY speed, thus causing the speed ceiling. This is due to the fact that 40MHz and multiple streams each suck significant battery power.

    This is my understanding for the speed ceiling.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    Very good point :) I've adjusted the text a bit to not mislead there :)

    Take care,
    Anand
  • alevmak - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link

    My understanding was that you get 150Mbit per spatial stream using the 20MHz channel, and 300Mbit at 150Mbit per spatial stream using the 40MHz channel.
  • freefx - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    Anand,
    I'm interested to know where you got the SDIO interface speeds from, but SDIO spec 2.00 (which is used by several vendor's current mobile wireless solutions) supports High Speed 4-bit SD Mode at 50MHz (200Mbps). The current SDIO spec 3.00 adds support for UHS-I which allows for 208MHz in 4-bit SD mode giving you 832Mbps theoretical maximum throughput.

    I also find it difficult to believe (if i'm reading you correctly), the everyone from Apple to Microsoft uses the same SDIO "software stack". The SDIO interface if fairly hardware dependent, and any drivers written for it will depend on the device's operating system and host processor vendor. SDIO is also fairly simple and rewriting a driver for SDIO isn't that complicated and is just an extension of the standard SD interface to add an interrupt and some IO specific registers.

    I would imagine a larger bottleneck is in how much processor time is being given to the wlan driver that uses the SDIO interface and the RF chip itself. Trying to pump through a massive amount of data and managing the wlan connection uses a good bit of processing power, and you don't want to make your device sluggish just to push through 65Mbps, which is the typical theoretical max of the wlan mobile chipsets RF radios anyway (when using a single 802.11n channel).

    Your articles are usually pretty good, I just don't agree with your assessment of SDIO being a limitation, and board level USB being a better replacement.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    The issue as I've seen depends on the SoC and the WiFi controller. Older SoCs still implement SDIO 1.0, while the WiFi chips a lot of devices use are SIDO 1.2 compliant. Best case scenario for SDIO 1.2 appears to be 196Mbps, but it looks like there are other limitations in the chain there as well. Newer SoCs implement SDIO 2.0 (and HSIC) but I don't know that many of the WiFi devices are up to that point yet.

    I believe we are going to see 802.11ac based solutions using both SDIO and HSIC going forward. It would make sense that they would implement higher bandwidth versions of SDIO as well for those customers who choose to use it.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • Yuniverse - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    Just curious, but have you tried the speed of the wifi on iPad 2 with 5GHz? I don't see it on the chart and when I test my speed with speedtest.net app, it consistently gives me 38.xxx Mbps down/ 21Mbps up. Kind of like the Touchpad on 5GHz you have up there.
  • name99 - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    Anand stated in an earlier article that all modern Apple kit uses Broadcomm chips, and these chips, when talking to each other, can use some of the optional features of the n spec to improve performance.

    In other words, if you use an iPad2 with a recent Airport Base Station, you may well get 10-15% better performance than if you use that same iPad2 with some other random base station which does not use a Broadcomm chip.
  • shabby - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    Customer: Wow that phone is 5g?!?
    Sales Rep: Yes it is... <says silently> the wifi portion at least
    Customer: So its faster than my 4g phone?
    Sales Rep: Of course... <says silently> the wifi portion at least
    Customer: shut up and take my money!

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