Understanding The Engineering Behind High-End Smartphones

February 22, 2012
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Many people these days have purchased themselves a smartphone on their favorite wireless carrier.  The open nature of the hardware and software mobile phones used today makes for a lot of power, but also has problems with battery life and software.  Modern technologies are advancing quickest through the processor technology these devices are using, and they are absolutely incredible.  Understanding the advancement of these technologies and a little history is a good way to understand and know that the ultimate device is close.

Smartphones years back were always huge and power hungry monsters.  The hardware was slowly evolving, and the most powerful phones had weak graphics chips and power sucking screens.  Battery power was a huge factor, and it called for bigger batteries to keep up with the demand.  The progression of these devices was very slow, but their strength was good enough for most tasks people used them for.  This affected the software and hardware evolution for a while until the iPhone came out and changed people’s perception of the smartphone.

Powerful hardware and software were enormous advancements the iPhone exposed to the world.  The System On a Chip, or SOC, was a lot more incredible due to the powerful graphics card bundled in.  The past had a great deal of performance related issues, and the introduction of the iPhone and eventually Android put an end to the issues.  Many producers started to see how profitable the market could become, and started designing more efficient and impressive SOCs to place into their own phones.

The power behind these devices is the main reason companies have had trouble with battery life and performance.  The battery life and power balance has been a huge trouble for SOCs, since they have to continually scale up and down to meet the user’s current needs.  The software developers for these pieces of software have to make a decision between making them use less power or be faster as if the processor does not ever lower its clock speeds.  The processor uses a special core that is created for low power for almost everything, but will call on the other 4 as they are needed to complete more complex tasks faster.  This approach keeps a high performance design with power savings much better than today’s units.

LTE has also made it more possible to do things that are online-related.  Even many businesses that offer home cable Internet do not offer speeds that can make use of Cisco SFP transceiver modules as much as LTE does.  Although the speed does not compare yet, LTE is made to evolve over time, and with the promise of future engineering, is likely to become a wireless alternative to SFP fiber modules.

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