Apple’s success with “Smart Power”

[257Loner]

According to Wikipedia, “In international relations, the term smart power refers to the combination of hard power and soft power strategies.” Apple has found success with “smart power” through a combination of hardware and software. Here’s two examples:

Though Apple Silicon’s integrated graphics cores are fewer than those of dedicated graphics chips, Apple does more with less and produces more fps through MetalFX upscaling.

Though the iPhone’s camera system is smaller than those of dedicated cameras, Apple does more with less and produces high-quality photographs through computational photography techniques.

Does anyone know of any other examples of "smart power" approaches Apple takes with their products?

 

[gwang73]

Popular audio and video codecs are implemented in hardware to reduce power consumption.

For example, HEVC has a high complexity for encoding and decoding which results high battery consumption when it's software based. Newer apple silicon has it optimized in hardware, which gives the newer iPhone the very long run times when watching videos.

Other examples are the co-processor which runs at low power for things like tap/raise to wake, hey siri and tracking steps, crash detection, homekey, express passes, etc. and the neural engine cores which handles all the ML on device.

 

[257Loner]

Popular audio and video codecs are implemented in hardware to reduce power consumption.

For example, HEVC has a high complexity for encoding and decoding which results high battery consumption when it's software based. Newer apple silicon has it optimized in hardware, which gives the newer iPhone the very long run times when watching videos.

This makes great sense. Thank you for explaining that. So if the processor is optimized to play certain kinds of codecs, then one can reap the benefit of playing more efficiently compressed and smaller videos without impacting your device's battery life as the processor decodes the codec's compression algorithms in order to play the video.

 

[gwang73]

This makes great sense. Thank you for explaining that. So if the processor is optimized to play certain kinds of codecs, then one can reap the benefit of playing more efficiently compressed and smaller videos without impacting your device's battery life as the processor decodes the codec's compression algorithms in order to play the video.

That's right. Note that this is not unique to Apple. Common codecs like HEVC, AVC are HW optimized in most mobile processors to save battery.

Now some websites or apps may use codecs that are not HW optimized and therefore those apps or sites may consume more battery when watching videos.