Phab-u-lous, Mate: Huawei's business phabs go upmarket

Huawei’s “phablet” line, the Mate series, has languished in relative obscurity, but that’s set to change. The three new Mate 10 models unveiled yesterday are set to push the business-focused niche to the forefront of the Chinese giant’s portfolio. Highly regarded for its stonking battery life, the Mate series has been hard to …

[Tromos]

"crunching 16-bit floating point numbers"

16 bits is inadequate for integers in many cases. For floating point it is laughable.

[Dan 55]

Re: "crunching 16-bit floating point numbers"

I don't think C even does a two byte float.

Edit: it's a thing in graphics cards, apparently. FP16. So the fail is for us crusty server-side programmers for not knowing.

[Dave 126]

Re: "crunching 16-bit floating point numbers"

@ Tromos

It's an NPU, not a CPU, as stated in the article. It's designed for assisting the phone's machine learning. 3rd party apps can use it with Tensorflow and Caffe 2 APIs.

2017 is the year of custom silicon beyond CPU and GPUs, with the new Pixel phone and iPhobes boasting various Image and Signal Processing Units.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/huawei-bets-big-on-ai-features-in-new-mate-10-and-mate-10-pro-smartphones/

[montyburns56]

How much?

I think preferred Huawei when they used to make cheap and cheerful devices. I know that that high end devices are where most of the profits are, but still....

[ukaudiophile]

I've found the Huawei phones to be solid workhorses, not too expensive, so if a user breaks one it's not the end of the World, but they don't look so cheap that users are embarrassed to use them.

The Huawei apps and UI are truly terrible, the hardware is good and reliable, but Huawei's software is dire.

Thankfully once you've replaced the launcher with Google Now Launcher and replaced Huawei's own app's for some replacements from the Android store, you have a good, cost effective work phone.

Still couldn't bring myself to pay out for a top of the line 10 or 10 Pro, but sooner or later the prices will descend to more sensible levels.

[peterm3]

It would be great to see a buyers guide for what I would call midrange, £300 phones. Andrew Orlowski must see enough mobes coming through his letterbox to tell what's hot and what's not.

Would be great, just in time for Black Wednesday / January sales.