21 ms·
Why Asus trackpad driver sets the CPU speed at maximum during scroll
- fleshweasel 12y agoaaand this is why I don't respond when friends ask me which PC laptop they should buy.
- busterarm 12y agoyou too!? I used to at least be able to recommend ThinkPads but I can't even do that anymore. I pretty much only have Macs left as an option at this point, but not one that I'm super thrilled about. I mostly use VPS and a $600 _should_ be fine.
- spost 12y agoI'm a bit out of the loop, what's gone wrong with ThinkPads?
- jdiez17 12y agoThey've started messing with the keyboards. I don't find this an issue personally (I'm typing this on a X1 Carbon 2014), but it bothers some people.
- bluedino 12y agoThe function keys missing is a pain. Moving home/end is a pain. People calling and asking how to shut the caps lock off when there isn't even a caps lock button is a pain (hint, double-tap the shift key)
- agumonkey 12y agoThe keyboard was, to me, a genuine attempt to improve things. But they did some very stupid things like removing LEDs, to be replaced by OS Notification. Nobody wants a corner of the screen saying 'CAPS LOCK PRESSED'.
- adamors 12y agoTalking about the 440 series: no physical buttons on the trackpad, keyboard changes, a lot harder to take apart, 12GB max memory. It's basically not a Thinkpad anymore but a black MBP wannabe.
- w1ntermute 12y agoThe changes to the keyboard and trackpad are being reversed in the next version.
- philippotto 12y agoDo you have a link for more information about the next ThinkPad versions?
- w1ntermute 12y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0BlRjcgcN8#t=24m15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0BlRjcgcN8#t=24m15s
- throwawayaway 12y agothat video does not say anything about the home/del/pgup/pgdn buttons...? does it?
- w1ntermute 12y agoThey're going back to the 6-row keyboard (top), not 7-row keyboard (bottom): http://i.imgur.com/NpmHQbL.jpg http://i.imgur.com/NpmHQbL.jpg
- sundvor 12y agoNice; that's the way my original X1 Carbon looks and I'm really happy with that keyboard. In particular, I absolutely love the nipple and the proper mouse buttons. Is there any chance of the linked keyboard actually making it back into the X1 line as well? I almost updated to the new one however they completely murdered it with the "adaptive" change. Capacitive function keys, home and end on the caps lock key, what _on earth_ were they thinking? http://arstechnica.com/staff/2014/01/stop-trying-to-innovate-keyboards-youre-just-making-them-worse/ http://arstechnica.com/staff/2014/01/stop-trying-to-innovate...
- busterarm 12y agoA growing trend of poor platform choices. The obvious stuff is that their once great keyboards are now terrible. Mouse buttons are the other one. On the more hardware nitty-gritty side of things though, nearly all of their laptops the last 4 years have heat problems, including one line that you can never use more than 50% of the CPU before it throttles due to severe overheat. My second-gen x100e is the second laptop I've ever used to actually give me a burn - and from doing nothing more than streaming a youtube video. Their x series are basically unusable and were the only ones I would consider buying to begin with. Sorely disappointed. Edit: Also their software is shit, but I don't use Windows on it anyway. They're still better than ASUS laptops though.
- Too 12y agoApart from the things other people here already mentioned. The speakers are the worst i have ever heard. I don't have high demands on laptop speakers to start with but this is way below any standards. Music you can just forget about and even in voip calls it's hard to hear what people are saying. And even when they are off they are bad! They keep sending out a faint white static noise, i first thought it's the fan but it's actually the speakers. Lenovos "solution" to this problem was to update the driver and turn off the spekers completely if there's been no sound for the past 5 seconds. Really annoying, any time you open a folder in explorer and the click sound plays it sounds like the fan turns on and then off again, same with intermediate IM notifications, i have to keep my laptop on mute because of this. So the speakers are useless for music, voip and notifications, what usage scenario is left? why even put them in?
- busterarm 12y agoI forgot about this! Oh yeah. Their headphone jack is pretty flimsy too, but it seems to be on most laptops. I'm pretty much resigned to using a USB sound card/headphone amp these days.
- TillE 12y ago> Their headphone jack is pretty flimsy too I really can't stand those. I've had the headphone jacks on two separate high-end Android phones go from crackly to completely unusable, while my ancient iPod nano is still rock solid after years of heavy use. A decent 3.5mm jack is not an expensive part, but so many manufacturers seem to opt for the cheap garbage that doesn't actually work.
- serf 12y agoand on top of that most thinkpads have switched to integrated mic/headphone combo jacks rather than separate ports. it's old fashioned, but I prefer them to be separated.
- agumonkey 12y agoI still like x61 a lot, not hard to find for less than 100$ on ebay. With the usual maximum ram + ssd upgrade you really have a neat little 4:3 rock solid machine. Most people buying ~600$ core i5 laptop will never reach the boot time and stability I get using *linux on this hardware. Next week I'll try x200/x201 family to see how better the cpu is (heat and battery life mostly).
- busterarm 12y agoYep. I've got Arch (soon to be OpenBSD) on my 2nd-gen x100e and I put in an SSD and upgrade to the A/G/N wifi card. There are some quirks but it's a decent system. I'm ready to move on though. These have heat problems though and everyone I know with an x2XX has worse problems than I do. Even with the $600 core i5s, it'd be getting the same OS. Hopefully they've switched to the newer Intel wifi cards because the Linux driver on the 5400AGN they were using has problems.
- agumonkey 12y agoArch user here too. I see a lot of articles saying BSD is saner than linux, and you're tempting me even more to try it. If you ever write about it post the url here.
- selectodude 12y agoI loved my X61 but I couldn't put up with how it sounded like it was going to take flight all the time.
- agumonkey 12y agoTrue, that's the main reason I try newer ones. If I was a gifted engineer I'd build a better heatsink so the fan would never kick in.
- thrownaway2424 12y agoI still have a x61 and a x220. I prefer the x220 obviously for being way faster and for having a giant Esc key (I use vim). Both totally solid. On the x61 I use tpfand and the fan almost never comes on.
- nly 12y agoI ordered a Thinkpad direct earlier this year and was really dissatisfied with the build quality and shipping. The new clicky touchpad in particular was just horrendous. It went back and I ended up going with a refurbed Dell Latitude. The keyboards is reasonable, and I have my nipple and sturdy build, but even at the reduced price I had to drop back to Intels integrated graphics (on reflection I don't miss dicking around with NVIDIAs proprietary Linux drivers one bit). It also came with a decent warranty.
- Habababi 12y agoWhat about Dell or Toshiba?
- cbr 12y agoI tell them to buy a Chromebook. (But I do talk with them back and forth to make sure a Chromebook will do everything they need.)
- bananaoomarang 12y agoThe sheer insanity of this... Wow. Just wow.
- rquirk 12y agoWould this all be fixed by installing a linux distro on the laptop? A different trackpad driver - if it works ;) - would do different stuff, and remapping media keys is possible in most desktop environments.
- Athas 12y agoYes, it would. This is actually a benefit of Linux (and the BSDs for that matter) - since all drivers are in the main kernel, you don't get as much idiocy from hardware makers that try to do something clever.
- tdicola 12y agoIt's a gamble though, in my experience Linux support for native device power management is very spotty. You might trade a crappy trackpad driver for no sleep, no CPU throttling, etc.
- mbq 12y agoNot really a gamble -- you usually can find reliable info about Linux support on the internet, provided that the device is not too exotic.
- rozap 12y agoThis doesn't happen to me on an asus zenbook and linux. Two finger scroll works fine, no proprietary drivers installed. In fact, all the functionality that you generally expect to be broken on linux (two finger scroll, keyboard lights, volume control, etc) worked out of the box...
- Havoc 12y agoIgnoring the trackpad angle...the idea of ramping up the CPU on scroll does make some sense. If you think about smartphones...the first place people bitch about lag is scrolling. Thats likely what the engineer was thinking about when they linked trackpad to CPU like that.
- edderly 12y agoTrue: https://source.android.com/devices/reference/power_8h_source.html#l00120 https://source.android.com/devices/reference/power_8h_source...
- AshleysBrain 12y agoNo, I don't think it makes any sense at all. CPUs/OSs have built-in mechanisms to automatically adjust frequency depending on the actual workload. If scrolling involves a minimal workload then it should remain in low-power state. This is a really power-hostile solution to solving a problem which should be solved another way. At the very least, if this really is an intractable lag problem (which I doubt - other manufacturers seem unaffected), then the driver should call an OS API that says something like "latency-sensitive user input has started/stopped", and then the OS makes the decision about whether to boost the CPU frequency, or do something more sensible, or be updated in future to use new hardware features to solve the problem even better, etc. This particular hack is just poor engineering. And users should at least be given the choice between "drain my battery or add a bit of lag", if the manufacturer can't figure out how to remove the need to make that choice.
- spion 12y agoThats mostly because Android used to have a really bad vsync/input synchronization before project butter[1] - the system had anywhere between 0 and 16.7ms to render the entire screen (which means easily < 4ms every 4 or 5 frames) instead of having consistent 16.7ms every time. No matter how fast the components, scroll input events would often happen 1ms before rendering time and a frame would have to be skipped, causing choppiness. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8m9sHdyXnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8m9sHdyXnE
- archagon 12y ago
- Too 12y agoSeriously? Asus still have this problem? I remember fixing it by removing the touchpad driver on a friends asus almost two years ago. The fan was always on max because the driver set min cpu speed to 100% at every reboot. I feel for the non tech savy people who don't know how to fix this and think this is how the computer should be. No wonder normal people prefer ipads over pcs.
- busterarm 12y agoMy friend spent like $3500 on his ASUS laptop and the touchpad never even worked...and he had multiple hardware replacements. I really just want a decent portable computer with no built-in input devices and USB ports as an option. Maybe I'm crazy. We should be able to do this with UEFI now.
- gregschlom 12y agoI bought an Asus Zenbook UX303LN 2 weeks ago after my 13" MacBook Pro got stolen, and while there are things that I miss from the MacBook (essentially, the fantastic touchpad quality), I'm overall satisfied with my Zenbook. It's a solid alternative to the MBP at a very attractive price. The only real issue is the touchpad. While it's not bad, there are a lot of things that just don't work as nicely as on the Mac. For example, if you try to rest your thumb on the touchpad the cursor will stop moving. Little things like that.
- seanp2k2 12y agoI don't understand why, after all these years, literally no other manufacturer has been able to nail the trackpad like Apple. The first few "clickpads" I used on laptops trying to imitate Apple were basically unusable, but even on recent models I've played with in stores, they're always just....not quite right to horrible.
- johnchristopher 12y agoI believe the trackpad of my asus 1000he notebook is pinnacle of non-mac trackpads. Supported equally on linux and windows. Soft to the fingers, responsive and precise. Two-fingers scrolling, wipe (kind), three-fingers scrolling, etc. Only missing thing is pinch-to-zoom.
- Guillaume86 12y agoThe trackpad on my Samsung np770z5e is great. Just install a good SSD on it and you have a great laptop (battery life is also very good). Edit: it also supports three fingers prev/next commands
- joelhaasnoot 12y agoTo be honest - I wonder if this support tech knows what he's talking about. The emails are signed "Asus Nordic" - probably a support outstation that does no real product development work, only support. He's trying to tell the customer someone in Taiwan told him this and/or it got lost in translation.
- Legogris 12y agoAsus are weird. I made the mistake of upgrading from Win 7 to Win 8 on my previous 2012 laptop. No Win 8 compatible drivers to be found. Contacted support, who informed me that there are no plans to ever ship any Win 8 compatible driver. Relevant detail: On the product page of the laptop on Asus's website, they have a banner recommending Windows 8.
- gnu8 12y agoThey are contractually obligated to display that banner. It has nothing to do with Asus's actual products.
- sauere 12y agoAnd this kids, is why people buy Macs to serve as a $1500 facebook machine.
- krick 12y agoSo, really, is there anything left to buy except MacBooks anymore? I'm not a big fan of Apple, and would have to go through all sorts of nuisances to install Linux on it anyway, but the longer I search for solid 13" laptop, the more horrified I become. It cannot be that nobody makes nice laptops, can it?
- gioele 12y agoSamsung Series 9, now ATIV. No longer sold in EU.
- tkmcc 12y agoApparently Samsung's leaving the non-Chromebook laptop market worldwide in 2015. My ATIV Book 9 Plus has been awesome (besides the horrible bundled drivers and software) but I'm not sure what I could happily replace it with at this point besides a Surface Pro.
- sz4kerto 12y agoHP ZBook series, MS Surface Pro, Dell mobile workstations and top-end Latitude machines. Lenovo used to be in the list, but I'm not sure anymore. Mac trackpads are still the best of all but I personally can't stand OSX (and Windows/Linux is not too entertaining on a Macbook, still). However, it's only a personal preference and I can understand why people end up with buying Macs.
- ceejayoz 12y agoNo idea how solid it is, but there's always the truly hilariously named HP Envy 14" if you want something that looks like a Macbook with a Windows button. http://store.hp.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/us/en/mdp/Laptops/envy-14-88386--1 http://store.hp.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/us/en/mdp/Lapt...
- aftbit 12y agoWhat if you explicitly don't want a clone of a Macbook? When my X220 is too old for a laptop, I don't know what I'll do. Modern ThinkPads are pretty unacceptable now, with the new keyboards and the giant clicky touchpad.
- quinndupont 12y agoIn no way am I trying to incite Mac vs. PC, but after years of Apple laptops I grew bored with their aluminum fascism and decided (last year) to buy a top-of-the-line Thinkpad. A couple of months later, taking a huge economic hit, I sold the Thinkpad and returned to Apple. I simply could not handle the trackpad (and I gave up on the weird Thinkpad nubbin back in the early 2000s). I quite literally felt like I had a degenerative neuromuscular disease when I used the trackpad, and since "mousing" is almost certainly the primary way I interact with a computer, the laptop itself begun to give me a strong, strange aversion to use. I'm told Microsoft is working on improving trackpads in general, but they should really have every single engineer working on this issue. Forget about new features, let's get the simple stuff right.
- damon_c 12y agoI occasionally have to use an HP laptop and I concur. It is really a completely different experience. I need to use two hands to accomplish something like moving the cursor to a folder icon and right clicking on it. On a Mac this can be done with a single finger and without even engaging the brain. This model of HP laptop is used by everyone at this one company. They don't even know how awful it is. It's really like that 1984 Mac commercial.
- yclept 12y agoThe Thinkpad nipple mouse on my x220 is glorious to use
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ams6110 12y agoI agree, I much prefer this style of pointer to a trackpad because I don't need to move my hands.
- serf 12y agoI love it, too. I hate that Lenovo no longer makes a ThinkPad with only that style pointer any longer. I always felt the trackpad was a big waste of space since I never use them.
- jthol 12y agoI have to give the CS rep some credit as he does seem to be trying to make things better. It's more response than a lot of manufacturers would have given.
- lnanek2 12y agoHonestly, this is the way Android went as well, with touches boosting processors as well. Everyone is scrambling to try to scroll as smooth as Apple, lol. The author seems kind of strange being against it, honestly. It is usually hailed as a feature, not a bug.
- wvenable 12y agoYou don't understand; this doesn't boost the CPU on touch -- it changes your power management settings so the minimum CPU state is always 100%.
- overgard 12y agoI used to have this gaming laptop from Asus (I need fast graphics), and one of the things they did was deck it out with a lot of ridiculous lights (because gamers, apparently?). One of the more mystifying things it did: the giant lights on the back of the screen would do this really distracting blink when the laptop was in sleep mode. I have no idea what the thought process there was -- why would anyone want their laptop to do that when they're not using it? Not only was it a waste of battery, it was incredibly annoying. And keep in mind this wasn't a small light, it was a light that ran a circuit around the entire screen. Luckily you could turn it off, but I have no idea why it was on in the first place. They also had this bios screen that had a logo for the "Republic of Gamers" (seriously?) that would then explode. That was more amusing than problematic, but I wonder who comes up with these ideas.
- crististm 12y agoYou can just imagine the product meetings where these decisions are made. I'm horrified whenever I do that. Turns out Dilbert cartoons come from hidden cameras
- sydney6 12y agoImagine: A Thinkpad x/t/w with the old non-chiclet Keyboard without their "new" Layout, old-sytle Trackpad/Pointer with physical Buttons, a non-low-voltage Haswell with 2 RAM Slots, capable of containing at least 16 Gigs of Memory, a removable, non-integrated Battery, proper Intel-Chipsets and their LED-backlit Display in the old magesium-style Body with aluminium Hinges and the old mechanical display closing Mechanism. And the old, yellow Powerconnector. And the a Thinklight. And .. I simply do not get why Lenovo has made these changes. My wildest guess would be that MS & Intel has pushed/forced Vendors into their "Ultrabook"-Model. And yet, for all these Sonys, Samsungs and HPs, it could be this simple.
- BostonEnginerd 12y agoI would buy this laptop in a heartbeat.
- userbinator 12y agoI think it's more about Lenovo trying to appear "new" and "stylish", going after the Macbook designs. Cost reduction could also be a part of it. Every other laptop on the market now looks like a Macbook clone. What they're forgetting is that many of the people who buy Thinkpads actually like the old-school, "serious business" look-and-feel that originated with IBM. They could continue making a model that is almost exactly identical to the X60/X61 (an "X62"?) but with a faster CPU, more RAM, and higher-res display, and I'd bet they'd still have many customers.
- jakobegger 12y agoHaving just spent two days optimising the scrolling performance of my Mac app I understand the reasoning behind this. Fluid scrolling is hard. And while scrolling might be handled in part by the GPU, its still the CPU that renders the text that you're scrolling. If you're aiming for 60FPS, you probably have less than 10ms to render a screen when the user is scrolling quickly.
- blkhp19 12y agoIf you don't mind me asking, what optimizations are you making? I'm curious about what it takes to get 60 FPS scrolling in a Mac app.
- jakobegger 12y agoIn my specific case, I'm displaying a table view with hundreds of rows and potentially dozens of columns. The bottleneck was the slow text rendering in App Kit. Text rendering is pretty fast when you render long strings, but there is a lot of overhead when rendering many short strings. My first step was to switch to using CoreText, a lower level API for rendering text. This reduced overheads by around 50%. My second step was to cache layout information for recently displayed strings in a small cache. Tables often contain a lot of repeated values so this saved a lot of time; in some cases up to 70%. After these optimizations, my own code was no longer the bottleneck. I still don't reach 60FPS on my 2009 Macbook Pro, but that was expected... (Note: 60FPS scrolling is not a problem if your views are smallish, so that they can be entirely cached on the GPU; the problem occurs only when your views are very large and the users scrolls very fast so that the CPU can't keep up with rendering tiles for the GPU)
- blkhp19 12y agoI'm not too familiar with how a table view in OS X compares to UITableView on iOS, but are cells reused? I feel that that optimization alone would at least limit what needs to be rendered to what's on screen.
- maxwell2022 12y agoThat's typically the experience I got with all Asus product I owned: Disappointment !
- eddiedunn 12y agoJust put Linux on it. Seriously. My sister and I have the same Zenbook, and while my trackpad runs like a dream in Elementary OS, her trackpad is among the worst I've ever had the displeasure of using on a laptop -- and this is solely due to the shitty Windows drivers. She's been nagging me to put Linux on her computer as well, and once Freyja is released, I will.
- jmgtan 12y agoI'm using a Thinkpad (T440) at work and whenever I have to undock from my desk I have to bring my mouse because I find myself always clicking the wrong things. Now I use an rMBP at home, and more often than not I actually play Diablo 3 using just the trackpad, maybe I'm just used to it, but I haven't used a non-Apple laptop that has a usable trackpad.
- userbinator 12y agoThe problem of smooth scrolling without much-increased CPU usage was solved long ago, in the era of 8-bit systems, by rendering slightly more lines to the framebuffer and simply changing the address in VRAM where the CRT controller started reading the data for a frame. The CPU could then render the additional scrolled-out lines in the background. But it seems the common way to implement scrolling today is to either have the CPU or GPU actually move the data unnecessarily; there's no easy way to do the equivalent of adjusting the pointer to the window's data in memory so that the windowing system can scroll without having to perform any data movement. Asus' trackpad driver may be at fault for turning the CPU up to 100%, but to me this is a sign of a deeper problem having to do with how inefficiently applications are doing their scrolling, and the APIs that encourage this inefficient way of doing it.
- brigade 12y agoWell apps want to scroll more than just a static image. And it's only partly the API's fault - OS X switched to overdraw only recently in 10.9, and without any major change to API.
- nathanb 12y agoFWIW, I have an Asus netbook running Linux, and the trackpad seems to work fine and not exhibit this behavior. Reading the article, this seems to be a Windows-specific issue (or, more accurately, an issue with the Asus Windows driver). Oddly, I also don't see the problem as described by the Asus engineers. Perhaps it's because Linux power management is different enough that it doesn't apply, or because it's a different processor type (dual-core Atom). One would think they could at least make this a configuration setting so users may choose whether to live with janky scrolling in order to not have gestures turn the laptop into a space heater.