Categories
computers microsoft

Surface Book: GPU Deep Dive

The Surface Book. It was an exciting moment to watch Panos unveil a premium laptop (finally!) and, shortly thereafter, pull the display off its keyboard base. With only a few weeks between launch and hard availability, anticipation and excitement has been maintained. I even stayed home to await delivery, the morning of October 26.

There are 3 important aspects that drew me to the Surface Book:

  • All the trappings of an excellent laptop (weight, size, battery life, display)
  • Form factor versatility
  • Discrete GPU for light-medium gaming

I have lots to say about the Surface Book, but I wanted to dwell on the last point, first. I’m not a heavy gamer, but I do enjoy some strategy games, occasionally. I’ve compromised that capability in my laptop choices, to date, as I value weight and mobility more. So, needless to say, I was eager to see how the Surface Book would handle those gaming scenarios.

Microsoft (and NVIDIA) continue to remain mum on the particulars of the discrete GPU. It was announced as a Maxwell-based part, with 1GB GDDR5. Now, this is a combination that has never been seen before and, interestingly enough, Panos spoke to its use primarily as an accelerator for professional content-creation applications, such as AutoCAD and the suite of Adobe tools. Yes, some light gaming was also mentioned, such as League of Legends, but with the Surface Book’s hardware and price points targeting prosumers and content professionals, no effort was made to match, performance-per-dollar, gaming laptops.

With Surface Books in the wild, we know that it’s a GM108-based part, with 1GB GDDR5 @ 5GT/s. The 940M-equivalent GPU disappointed some, but I also expected the GDDR5-enabled bandwidth to improve performance, not insignificantly, over the standard DDR3 configuration. Here’s a spec comparison. Note the 940M core and memory speeds vary, based on design implementation.

gpu_table

With 2.5X the memory bandwidth, we should see some substantial improvements. I’ve compared game performance, across a few titles, using an 840M (from which the 940M is rebranded), the Surface Book’s integrated Gen9 HD 520, and the discrete Surface Book GPU. Framerates are average and game settings are as follows:

  • Bioshock Infinite – 1080p, Medium setting
  • Total War: Attila – 1440×900, Performance setting, Shadows – Max Performance, Texture – Medium
  • Shadow of Mordor – Surface Book @ 1500×1000, 840M @ 1536×864, Low setting

surface_book_gpu_benchmarks

Across these three games, all of which have built-in benchmarking tools, the Surface Book dGPU is 2X faster than the integrated and anywhere between 20-33% faster than the 840M/940M, from which it is derived. It does stand that in many games, like Shadow of Mordor and Attila, in the tests, 1GB VRAM limits you to lower texture fidelity, compared to 2GB; in practice, the GM108 isn’t fast enough to drive those higher textures at sufficient framerates for a good experience, anyways.

While all of this pixel-pushing is going on, the fans (both in the clipboard and in the keyboard base) spin up to varying degrees. They make their presence known primarily by a rushing, whooshing sound, and limited amount of high-pitching whine, which makes the noise more bearable than most caused by small-diameter fans and blowers.

So, you can play some games on a Surface Book, as well as it use it as a pretty slick multi-use productivity machine, otherwise. But, I as found out over the subsequent couple weeks of use, it has its share of teething pains.

Categories
design development

Code

It’s been a heck of a while since I posted. Looking back upon the recent posts, the sad fact is I can count all the posts, written in the past year, on two hands (e.g. 10). Work and real life have become increasingly demanding and time has simply flown by.

I had some free time this weekend; I decided to spend it on this largely neglected space, first deciding to spruce it up, with some visual tweaks to better delineate pieces of content. I am also pretty partial to both minimalist and Material Design trends, so you might see of that here.

The combination of php and css theme files usually mean I fire up Notepad++ and go to town. But, just before I did that, this afternoon, I recalled we recently launched Visual Studio Code, a light-weight, multi-platform editor, with some handy features you’d normally find in an IDE. The full-blown Visual Studio hasn’t risen to the top of my simple web-editing tools list, but Code looked better targeted. A 50MB download and short install later, I was up and running.

For the few hours’ work, I found four handy features that helped me get things done more quickly and with fewer errors that normal:

  1. File management – I opened up the WordPress theme folder, doubled clicked one of the files and was away. I could view the entire context of the theme files and quickly jump from one to another. Autosave made viewing design changes in a browser just that little bit quicker.
  2. Editor layout – Snapping two, even three files side-by-side was very useful, for editing a post template (or two), while simultaneously looking at the CSS stylesheet. I later found out you can accordian-minimize windows and switch between them, to fit even more, side-by-side.
  3. Search – The modified theme this site is based on includes multiple content type templates. I initially cringed at the thought of adding a new styling class to the content div, included in each of these templates (and more likely elsewhere). However, I discovered the global search function, which suddenly made it trivial to update every file that needed touching. On other occasions, searching for classes in the stylesheet is made simple with file search; result locations are denoted in the scroll bar, so you can quickly jump around between instances, as well.
  4. IntelliSense – IntelliSense has helped make countless developers more productive, and by providing it in Code, there are far fewer context switches to peeks at references. It even has highlighting to tell you when one of your styles is rendered ineffectual by some other property you defined.

All in all, I had a bit of fun, cleaned up the theme, and discovered a new favourite WordPress theme editor.

Categories
gadgets microsoft reviews

ASUS X205 – First Impressions

For several years, I’ve watched low-cost Chromebooks chip away market share in the entry notebook segment and chomp away at the education market. In the Windows PC ecosystem, you could find notebooks within spitting distance of Chromebook costs ($200-300). Though price points were close, the actual devices were not. The notebooks were 15.6″, 6lb, 4hr battery life “portable desktops”. It was the equivalent of cross-selling a cost-reduced pickup truck against an affordable compact sedan.

Very recently, with the help of appropriate SoC platforms and Windows licensing programs, a trickle of ultraportable $199-249 Windows notebooks have come to market, and are being greeted by reasonable sales (5 out of the top 20 Amazon bestselling notebooks are PCs from this category) and good customer feedback (4.3/5 stars for those 5 bestseller models). I hope this encourages the thoughtful design compromises that are needed at this price segment. On a personal note, I like to think I had a role in these coming about; in my last weeks in the Windows PC Ecosystem team, I co-pitched a number of OEMs these SoC-eMMC-ultraportable notebook configurations in the <$250 segment. I recall consternation, from product managers, about the Windows 8.1 experience with these chipsets, 2GB RAM, and limited user storage (typically 32GB eMMC, due to cost pressures). As we’ll talk about later on, the optimizations to Windows 8.1 and efforts around WIM Boot helped make these systems possible.

I’m writing this from the keyboard of the ASUS X205, a faster, lighter, longer-lasting reincarnation of the netbook. It may be the purest form, to-date, of what the modern netbook can be, with its tablet silicon guts, optimized for consumer electronics-like, consumption-oriented usage. Its technical specs bear that out:

  • Intel Atom Z3735F – 1.33GHz base clock (HFM) and 1.83GHz Turbo clock, Bay Trail platform, tablet SoC. It has a 2.2W SDP, meaning in this chassis, it can be passively cooled.
  • 2GB DDR3L 1333MHz RAM – 1x64bit bus, 10.6GB/s bandwidth. Compared to LPDDR3, this will have a negative impact on Connected Standby battery life.
  • 32GB eMMC (Hynix) – As the perf benchmarks will show, this is a middle-to-upper tier eMMC 4.5 part, a bit slower in sequential R/W than a typical 2.5″ 5400RPM laptop drive, but easily an order of magnitude faster at <512KB random R/W. That matters a ton for system responsiveness.
  • 11.6″ non-touch display – 1366×768 TN panel, glossy, typical run of the mill
  • Broadcom dual band WiFi (up to 802.11n) – supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, which is fantastic for cramped airwaves in apartments
  • ELAN touchpad – has nearly identical dimensions to a 16:9 4.7″ display and while not a Precision Touchpad, at least exhibits a bunch of the characteristics – smooth two-finger scrolling, granular pinch-zoom, panning to the Windows 8 All Apps view via vertical scrolling.
  • Ports – 2xUSB 2.0, microHDMI, microSD slot
  • Dimensions – 286 x 193.3 x 17.5 mm (WxDxH)
  • Weight – 980g

First up, here’s what the out of box experience looks like:

  • You get a simple cardboard box containing the laptop, a charger, manuals and a redemption code for OneDrive storage.
  • Time from first power-on to having a configured system and Windows user profile was 5 minutes flat.
  • I hit a bug that prevented me from using a Microsoft Account during profile setup – I’ll have to check up on that.
  • The ~29GB of formatted storage has 8GB reserved for a recovery partition. To Windows, 17.2GB of free space remains out of the visible 20.8GB OS/data partition. This system uses WIM boot in order to shrink its required OS footprint.
  • Unfortunately, there are 600MB of Windows Updates pending; after download and installation, free storage space shrinks to  14.9GB.
  • After installing the client apps of Office 365, I have 13.1GB of free space.
  • After employing Windows’ function to create a copy of the recovery partition on a USB key, I’m mulling deleting the partition from the eMMC disk.

I’ve used the laptop as my regular couch or counter surfing machine, since I received it in early November. After a few weeks, there are already a few highlights to call out about the hardware:

  • It is very light and portable. It gets tossed around the condo, from the den to the kitchen counters to the couch to the bed. It’s a great reference/fact checker machine, since it resumes so quickly (thank you, Connected Standby).
  • What’s Connected Standby? Think of it as the smartphone or tablet-like responsive experience; your data is always up to date and system resume times are nearly instantaneous, shorter than the time it takes to open the lid to viewing position. That’s simply fabulous.
  • Quality of materials is good. Under normal typing pressure, the keyboard deck remains firm, wrist-rests don’t flex. There is some flex in the display lid, if you push on the back. There’s a bit of creaking, when picking it up from a corner, with the lid opened, which is the position of maximum leverage one can put on the device.
  • Battery life (active and standby) is stellar. I’m seeing 11.5-13 hours of real-world light usage battery life and 350-400 hours of Connected Standby (15 days). When I open the laptop and see 10% battery life left, I know I still have an hour (!) of use left.
  • Performance is sufficient, for consumption-oriented scenarios. I typically run IE with 6-8 tabs open, an Office app, and a couple Modern apps (Mail and Finance are regulars). There is no issue multitasking between them. Responsiveness is particularly high, compared to typical PCs in the price segment, given the order of magnitude advantage in random disk I/O performance.
  • Thermals are under control. With my workload, I’ve not felt any part of the device get warm, much less hot. There are no fans. Silence is golden.
  • The display is not a deal breaker, but it’s just a simple TN panel, and color-shift is evident at any viewing angle other than perpendicular. More annoyingly, due to the particularly narrow vertical viewing angles, common to TN, there is color shift across the vertical axis of the display, as the your viewing angle of incident varies down the display.
  • Physical input is nicely sized (particularly the touchpad), and again is functionally better than many larger, cheap laptops. In particular, the touchpad, for which we impressed importance time and time again with OEMs, actually does not suck.
  • The AC power adapter is a single cord segment type, providing 1.75A @ 19V (33W). The wall-wart does not have foldable prongs.

This isn’t a mobile powerhouse, nor is it a premium device, hewn from premium materials. However, for $179-199, there are a bunch of areas it exceeds expectations.

  • Input (keyboard and touchpad) quality
  • Weight-footprint-portability
  • Real world battery life
  • Responsiveness
  • Design and build quality

Don’t purchase this as a cheap replacement for the family desktop from 5 years ago. This will be slower, overall. Do purchase this, if you have tablet-like use cases and want tablet-like battery life and responsiveness, but think you need to buy a keyboard case, to make that tablet truly useful.

Another popular Windows option in this segment is the new HP Stream 11 (also $199). I mainly couldn’t accept the colour options, but you should get very similar performance with that PC. Trade off the free year of Office 365 Personal, 1TB OneDrive, and larger keyboard (Stream 11) against Connected Standby responsiveness, battery life, and portability of a smaller and 0.5lb lighter laptop (X205).

Categories
apple reviews tech

iPhone 6 – First Impressions

I’ve been using an iPhone 6 as my primary device since launch day, 9/19, and iOS, at length, for the first time since the iPhone 3G-era. That was during the days of iPhone OS 2.0, which brought along the App Store, officially supporting third party apps for the first time. For the past 9-10 months, I’ve used a Lumia 1520 and Nexus 5 interchangeably, getting to know their hardware, software and ecosystems. At this point, I understand what each Windows Phone and Android have to offer, and surprisingly, after nearly a year, neither device feels outdated (a sign of slowing generational leaps in smartphones, surely?). However, I’ve been itching to see where Apple is and experience the “just works” commentary I hear from users and the top-rated app ecosystem. Here are my early thoughts in two sections, Hardware and Features.

Hardware

  • It looks less “distinctly-iPhone”, with its larger size, rounded and curved corners and nondescript back. The Apple logo and the round home button on the front remain, so don’t worry, folks will still know you’re using one. Given so many phones are using the chamfered-chrome-band look, recently, perhaps this move to less glamorous accoutrements will, ironically, make it more distinctive.
  • First impression upon taking it out of the box was one of amazement of its thinness and lightness, having come from primarily Lumia devices over the past couple years.
  • My second impression was that it’s hellishly slippery. The very finely anodized aluminum contributes, as does the fact that it’s so thin (and rounded). I don’t even have clammy hands to help; it’s like holding a wet rock.
  • Apple barely met the competition on display resolution this generation (and undershot a bit with the iPhone 6). However, the selection of in-cell touch (LCD display + capacitive sensors being one and the same) and cover glass make displayed contents appear to be splayed directly on the glass’s surface. Contrast is also very good, maximum brightness very high, meaning viewing quality, both indoors and outdoors, is relatively high.
  • When the rumored iPhone 6 chassis first leaked, I was convicted that they were fakes, due to the unsightly plastic antenna domain dividers. Unfortunately, that’s not the case; they were the real thing, and the lines remain ugly. I specifically picked the color variant that I thought would make it show up the least, Space Grey.
  • The aesthetic problem with the antenna lines are two-fold, in my opinion: first, they’re too thick to look well-integrated, and second, the way they wrap around the top and bottom curved portions of the phone make them appear less like a deliberate part of the design. Instead, it’s as if the phone was designed without them, then realized, shoot, antenna performance sucks!
  • I picked Space Grey, and the curved black display and bezels blend together into a smooth, monolithic mass. From the front, it’s nice and minimalistic. I like it.
  • The camera bump is a non-issue (thus far).

iPhone 6 - DisplayiPhone 6iPhone 6 - Camera

Features

  • I’m now addicted to unlocking my phone with Touch ID. One lazy press of the home button, with my thumb, and I’m taken to the home screen, even though I have my work Exchange connected and corporate security policies applied. It’s also a fantastic way to skip typing passwords. It might be my single favorite feature, because it’s fast and reliable (camera performance rivals for this prestigious award).
  • Regarding display resolution, mentioned above, one way Apple makes up for no-longer-class-meeting specs is in font rendering. In apps that are updated for the display resolution of the iPhone 6 (largely the first party apps, at this point), text is incredibly narrow, smooth, and clear. Reading web content maintains this crispness, while fitting more content onto the display, now that it’s larger.
  • The rear image sensor remains 8MP in resolution, but optics and processing have been marginally improved (see this wonderful comparison of iPhone family camera IQ). Most significantly, phase-detect autofocus (on-sensor) has been added, helping in two regards: faster autofocus and more reliable focus tracking (with continuous autofocus). The second benefit supports grabbing in-focus, fast action, 240fps video.
  • The practical benefits, for me, (I care largely about stills) are insanely quick and accurately focused photos. The focus and shot-to-shot performance difference versus my Lumia 1520 (which, albeit isn’t known for quick autofocus) is similar to a DSLR versus a point and shoot camera. And though the final image quality isn’t as good as what the Lumia 1520 can achieve, it’s more consistent, giving me more confidence I can get at least a shot. Additionally, taking panoramas is an incredibly smooth experience, and the stitching speed and quality are top tier, as I discovered first-hand at Mount Rainier, the first weekend out with it.

rainier_ios_pano

  • I’ve become unfamiliarized with iOS since I last used it many, many years ago. I’m still a huge kludge, not yet habituated with the information and interaction hierarchies, particularly, as some common actions are quite different from Windows (Phone) or Android. For example, I constantly look to the bottom of apps for more options, settings, only to have to remind myself that they’re largely in the central settings store. I’ve not yet decided whether one is worse or better, just different, at this point.
  • Most interactions in iOS are highly polished, though. At least on latest-generation hardware, all the animations and transparency effects are smooth, menus well thought out, and a general air of cohesiveness and consistency is found throughout. The icons and colors haven’t grown on me, yet (it feels a bit… amateur?), but at least they’re everywhere. A few head-scratchers and complaints do exist:
    • In the notification drop-down, I really want a single gesture to dismiss items. Instead, you swipe to the left, then hit a small (x) target.
    • In the same area, app notifications are not cleared after visiting the app directly and viewing the reason for the notice in the first place (a very common example of this is email). Instead, one must manually dismiss the notification.
    • Speaking of notifications (:)), if I step away from my phone for a while, during which time, I receive a notification, no indication is made in the status area that I have pending notifications. It’s a surprise every time – ooohh, do I have notifications? Ahhh, not this time!
    • The little bubbles atop app icons indicating the number of missed items does not get dismissed after entering the app; only when your email inbox is clean, clean, clean, will that number go away. So, it’s a perpetual reminder that I’m very bad at triaging my inbox.
    • I’ve been spoiled by Windows Phone’s amazing handling of contacts, intelligently linking them if you have multiple input contact services, (such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Lync, etc.) and reducing clutter in your contacts list. iOS does nothing of the sort. Not only is the contact list a bee’s nest to navigate, it also complicates other apps that use your central contact list. For example, I ended up with 2-3 duplicate “favorite” entries for many, many contacts in WhatsApp. I went from 99 suggested to 43 real.
    • I’ve also been spoiled by the fantastic inbox productivity apps in Windows Phone, particularly as it pertains to supporting Exchange (the reason might be a no-brainer). Neither iOS nor Android do as a good of a job of exposing rich options for managing email-calendar invites and neither do a job at all of displaying Information Rights Managed email. I’m pretty sure there’s an app for that, though…
  • Top tier apps are impeccably polished, not to mention anything you’ve heard of is available, of course. They’re all fast and fluid, use reasonable layouts (although very, very few take advantage of the increased screen real-estate of the iPhone 6, much less the 6+), and I haven’t seen app crashes, thus far.
  • I’m not blown away by having so many apps at my fingertips, though. I don’t seem to have the urge to explore a bunch of apps. Perhaps that’s what using an app-deprived ecosystem does to you. You don’t know how to behave in the presence of them anymore. Assuming battery usage is a good indicator of what I use on my phone and how frequently, my iPhone is where apps go to die: 39% Email, 22% Safari, 11% Home & Lock Screen, 6% Messenger, 4% Stocks, 2% Calendar, 2% Gmail, and nothing else creeps above 1%.

iOS Utilization

Summary

There’s generally much to like about the iPhone 6, and while I’m not certain I’m any longer a representative smartphone user, I’ve had my memory refreshed as to why so many people prefer iOS and the iPhone hardware ecosystem. They generally look nice, developers put the most effort into their iOS app manifestations, and there are some genuinely excellent capabilities that many people care about, from a consistently good camera to simplifying security with Touch ID (and I’m looking forward to Apple Pay, as well). It’s also interesting to note that it’s been the first time in many generations since Apple’s hardware industrial design prowess has been questioned, with both the iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch questioned for the camera bump, antenna lines, indistinctiveness or gaudiness of design.

It will bear watching whether this is a temporary bump in the road, one smoothed out by the evolution of tastes over time, or something more persistent, an indication of a missing filter in Steve Jobs. iPhone 6iPhone 6iPhone 6 - Curved DisplayiPhone 6

Categories
design microsoft

Card-like Design

Microsoft may have helped usher in the trend of “flat” elements in UI with Metro, all the way back in the Zune days, and Google’s take with several pieces of the Android 4.0 experiences had more than a passing resemblance. However, more recently, Google’s manifestation of the principles are evolving, taking some cues from Facebook and Pinterest. Particularly impressive is the information density that they’ve been able to achieve, while maintaining whitespace, cleanliness, and organization. Take a look at Google+.

Google Plus

And, so, as part of design feedback’s cyclical nature, I’m seeing hints of a similar evolution in Microsoft’s recently announced products, over the past couple days. First came the MSN Preview, ushering in a completely new design and information organization scheme. It includes fantastic ties into the cloud-connected experiences I already use on my Windows Phone. For example, the stocks I follow, added to the Bing MSN Finance app on my phone, show up on the MSN portal, automatically.

MSN Preview 2014

Second, Office Delve, launched earlier today, is all about using information and relationships discovered via the Office Graph to surface relevant content and information (primarily in the form of documents and SharePoint content, from what I can tell). Think of it as Google Now, but for your work content. Not only that, its design and organization are similar, as well.

Office Delve

I, for one, quite like the card-like designs that are popping up. The content chunks reflow well for both large, multi-format displays (everything from 16:9 notebooks to 4:3 iPads, as examples) and smaller, portrait displays, like those found on smartphones. The cards are self-contained entities that give the user enough information and quick-action hooks to either dive deeper or move on.