- Apple A13: 8.5 billion
- Apple A12X: 10 billion (iPad Pro)
- Nvidia Titan RTX: 18.6 billion
I wonder what kind of use cases are unlocked with 16 billion transistors in your pocket. This node might be the one that gets us to AR.
The AR everyone imagines is much further away than most realize.
I see v1 as a simple narrow FOV heads up display in glasses frame with very focused use case around place based notifications and heads up information. No input at all, except Siri. Display only turns on when necessary. iPhone is used for input and config, much like Watch was initially.
Even getting to this v1 is going to be a huge challenge in such a small form factor, but a chip with this density will help with power budget. This node consumes 30% less power and fits in an even smaller space.
Microsoft was an operating system and word processor vendor who wanted to be many other things. The only other thing that ever turned a clear profit in a decade was their hardware division, which I gotta say was well deserved. But all of their money came from tech, and selling that tech. Google isn’t even that.
Google isn't going to be the one that creates breakthrough AR because that both requires sustained effort over long periods of time and being savvy about what mix of capabilities and details consumers will like. Google is structurally disadvantaged in both of these, which is why Glass has been a failure to date.
Facebook could make the hardware, they have a good research group. But they're at a big disadvantage for meeting core use cases because they lack any maps team, and place-based info is critical to early AR success. And as a company they're engagement-oriented, not really usefulness-oriented. AR is fundamentally a usefulness product, not an engagement product. VR is much more about engagement.
Obviously there's input possibilities from other devices, and I mentioned iPhone. Unlikely mouse and keyboard input for a long time - AR's unique offering is freedom of movement, not being tethered to a desk.
Again, a v1 really has to be a minimal product that is first and foremost a heads-up display for a narrow set of use cases. Else it'll be too bulky or awkward - just look at the rest of the AR devices out there.
If there’s one thing Apple's mobile engineering is uniquely good at, it’s building a low-latency pipeline. I think they could get the camera-to-screen latency low enough that they could build an AR wearable that is essentially a VR headset with wide-angle cameras on the front: This would enable the high-fidelity compositing that you already see on iPads and iPhones, basically leapfrogging everything else in the AR space without having to invent novel optical solutions.
Due to this, scale and other reasons, we’ve seen batteries become 15-20% cheaper year over year [2] for at least the last two decades.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb%27s_law [2] https://data.bloomberglp.com/bnef/sites/14/2017/07/BNEF-Lith...
It's linear, and it only applies to capacitors. Batteries are a completely different beast.
The cost reduction we have been seeing for batteries has completely different reasons, and no relation at all with that.
It does apply to spooled batteries, which is pretty much most modern batteries but most importantly Li-ion batteries
As stated in the Wikipedia article you linked to, that's an inverse-square law. That's a far cry from inverse-exponential.
Quadratic growth is very, very different from exponential growth – both from a theoretical as well as a practical perspective.
I guess the distance between the electrodes affect the internal resistance which can affect the effective energy output somewhat, but primarily it's the number of molecules that can undergo redox that affects the energy stored.
Our optics are already quite good, I don't think we need higher resolution cameras, just higher-speed cameras. I don't think this is impossible, we just don't have the processing power to deal with them yet.
For batteries, we already have some hope with the solid-state batteries of Goodenough.
We would still need more compute than this I believe, but this should get us close.
Add SLAM, CPU/GPU, Wireless radios... and do that all day on just a <5Wh battery (limited by a form factor anything close to a regular pair of glasses).
If you’re aware of any applications of LCD to accomplish optical subtraction in AR, I’d love to read up on them.
I don't think that's so difficult--once you can play games outside using headsets I think they will grow on people. Right now, as a fashion statement they represent people who sit at home and don't go outside. Not that there's anything significantly wrong with that, except it doesn't represent the majority.
Once we have good AR applications which work outdoors, the whole game will change.
The rule of thumb in batteries is about 6% a year, so doubling every 12. This hasn’t changed much if at all, and may actually be worse, since the very best AA rechargeable I could find 20 years ago was 1600mAh and that would mean I should have 5Ah AA’s now and are we even in the ballpark?
So if you saw new battery research that doubled battery density, either you would see it in about ten years or not at all. Goodenough is 94 which means one way or another, Braga (his collaborator) will have to finish this.
Also, important rule for mobile power: if someone mentions power density as one number instead of two, they have a horrible secret they don’t want you to know. Power density is measured per unit volume and per unit mass. There are very heavy small batteries and very voluminous light batteries and either one creates design issues for a portable device. You want a small light battery and not all breakthroughs improve this, and so may be limited to stationary applications.
There's no fundamental physical limit that forces AR/VR headsets to be big and heavy.
Compared to 8 billion? Realistically, it will let web developers write even more bloated Javascript SPAs without enough people complaining about the speed to improve it.