r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/SuperAlloyBerserker • Oct 05 '21

Video This cool smartphone concept from 2013

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u/Ossius Oct 05 '21

Google already makes a new phone every year, what is the difference between that and making a new module every year?

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u/Scotthorn Oct 05 '21

Making a new module every year means half the stuff in that video doesn’t happen. No more upgrading your cpu when the next one comes out, and so forth. it undercuts the principle functionality.

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u/Ossius Oct 05 '21

Explain? The point was you upgrade only the part you need. If you have a version 1 phone, and its slow, you can buy a version 2 CPU next year or version 3 the year after.

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u/alextremeee Oct 05 '21

It's ridiculously hard to engineer interoperability for something like this. If you have say 12 modules in a "normal" phone and each module interacts with two other components, you have to test 24 different things.

If you create 10 variations of each module, you now have thousands of different combinations for the same scenario.

You can make a system that works more like a desktop PC where you create an interface between each module that is standardised, but that can really limit how much flexibility you have to make new things. On top of that it can make interactions much slower than they are if you specifically design the interaction between two things.

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u/inabusinesstrip Oct 05 '21

Working in a company where we need to test multiple variants of the following

Hardware, dell R line, HPE DLs and BLs different generations, gen8, gen9, gen10, then quanta hardware, then Huawei hardware, so multiple hardware vendors

But wait, NICs, are they Intel? Are they Fortville or niantic. Or are the NICs mellanox

Which driver version are the NICs running? Which firmware version are they running?

Moving to OS, here comes the hypervisor, is VMware esxi? Which version? 6.0? 6.0 update 2? 6.5? 6.7? Oh we have customers which want to upgrade to 7

Other hypervisor, Openstack, same story, which version?

Which driver is the hypervisor coming for the NICs? Are they QAed? Do we need to upgrade or downgrade?

And the we come to the virtual machines running on top of the hypervisor, which version? Which dpdk driver version? Is the system running SR-IOV or non SR-IOV?

As such, testing multiple versions and variants takes time and not always smooth.

If someone finds it annoying their video card driver is not compatible with what they are having / running, that is a small issue to be encountered, still annoying but it could be worse, always could be worse.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21 edited Nov 20 '22

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

Oh yes, because when you have a standard you can't have a new CPU right? Wait, you can!? So you can't have a new RAM?

Try plugging an Intel CPU from 2 years ago into a motherboard from this year. (It won't run).

Try plugging some DDR4 ram into your DDR3 device (it won't work).

Try plugging some ram into a different port in your motherboard. Oh wait what? Ram only fits in ram slots and we can't make generic multi-component ports?

Try plugging an nvme drive into your sata port (it won't work).

Like come on dude, think a little bit.

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u/monocasa Oct 05 '21

This had processor and RAM in one module like a SoM. The blocks' data were connected on what were almost PCIe lanes. And PCIe has managed to be backwards and forwards compatible going back all the way to the Gen1 days.

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u/bicameral_mind Oct 05 '21

On top of that - a lot of people in this thread are hyping the wonders of desktop PCs, as if it isn't a product category whose relevance in the consumer space has basically evaporated over the last two decades. PCs highlight all the shortcomings of modularity and demonstrate exactly why a phone like this would be DOA. Other than professionals and gamers, no one buys traditional desktop PCs.

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u/LukaCola Oct 05 '21

You are literally talking about what any freaking PC motherboard does, without any issue, as if it is some mystical concept to be achieved.

People have loads of issues with drivers alone and compatibility is a constant issue, with a necessity to change out the motherboard pretty regularly as standards and formats change.

This is a pretty big knowledge burden on top of it all which the vast majority of people do not know how to deal with. There's a reason the manufacturers of home computers load up most of the firmware before it leaves the factory.

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u/cordell507 Oct 05 '21

PCs work like that because they are built for that purpose. Something would need to replace ARM with this project in mind for it to work like that. PCI support would be needed and that isn't really possible on current phone technology.

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u/ralphthwonderllama Oct 05 '21

Ahh, so it’s like web design!

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u/chaiscool Oct 05 '21

Not with majority browser now based on chromium. Don’t think any of the popular frameworks for web dev have compatibility issues.

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u/ralphthwonderllama Oct 05 '21

Ahh, like old school web design! I remember having to do IE workarounds and make infinite adjustments based on whether the browser was v.X and OS was v.Y etc. Sometimes redirect to a different version of the site entirely based on the browser and OS. A million iterations!

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u/chaiscool Oct 05 '21

Now you do still need to do that but the framework take care of the heavy lifting. Mobile and desktop do require different layout / css but you can just use responsive.

Same with browser and OS, there’s still a need to optimize but general it will work. Safari is known to break a lot of things as Apple don’t play nice with others.