Understanding The Technologies Behind High-end Smartphones

By Author: Tony Farinholt
Total Articles: 12
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Many people nowadays have purchased themselves a smartphone on their favorite wireless carrier. The open nature of the hardware and software cell phones used today makes for a lot of power, but also has issues with battery life and software. Even though it is not instantly apparent, the incredible speed that these phones have in their battery powered form is nothing short of an advanced marvel. It is easy to appreciate the smartphone when examining its history, but the products around the corner are much more extraordinary than the devices of today.

Smartphones in the past were always very large and power hungry monsters. The hardware was slowly evolving, and the strongest phones had weak graphics chips and power sucking displays. Larger batteries had to be made to keep up with the demand, and they made the units even larger. The development of these devices was very slow, but their ability was good enough for most tasks folks used them for. The introduction of the iPhone started the arc that formed today's technologies, before the software and hardware both affected each other's success.

The iPhone brought ...
... both matured software and powerful hardware to the smartphone world. One of the major things was the advancement of their System On a Chip (SOC), bringing a very powerful graphics card to the table. Many smartphones before were not optimized, given their tiny market share, but shortly afterward, Android was introduced, and became the first solid competitor to the iPhone. Many companies started to see how profitable the market could become, and commenced designing more efficient and strong SOCs to place into their own phones.

The way in which these chips work is why they have such a tough time providing the right battery life and performance. Up until recently, the big struggle was creating a top performing SOC that could also scale itself down dynamically to properly meet the user’s needs. The software programmers for these pieces of software have to choose between making them use less power or be quicker as if the processor does not ever lower its clock speeds. The idea the Tegra 3 chipset has is making a special low power part of the processor that is used for the majority of functions, and which can call on the other processors to be used when needed. This approach keeps a high performance design with power savings better than today's units.

The LTE radios are increasing the speed of Internet access for devices. Even many companies that offer home cable Internet do not offer speeds that can take advantage of Cisco SFP transceiver modules as much as LTE does. SFP fiber modules will have a hard time keeping up with demand when LTE devices inevitably evolve to be many times their existing speeds.