Smartphone Processors(SoC's) Explained!!

November 19, 2018

Smartphone Processors(SoC's) Explained!!

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about processors in smartphones. The technology they're made on, clock speed, and the number of cores can be really confusing.

Laying the Foundation:

Example: If a building needs to be constructed in which there will be an office and our employees will work in it and get the work done with excellent results. Here, this piece of land is a Silicon Wafer on which the processor is constructed. Now we will need an architect who can design a good foundation for a processor. You may ask, what is the need of hiring an architect to design our processor when we can create it on our own?. Yes, we can create it on our own, but to utilise every single inch of that empty land, we will definitely need an architect as he is more experienced than us. We should go to an architect who can lay a good design and hence, we consider going to a reputed architect, i.e. ARM (Advanced Risk machines). ARM constructs designs of processors and the designs can be of many forms such as Cortex-A53, Cortex-A75, Cortex-A7, etc. Better the design, the better the utilisation of the empty land.

Where things start getting Interesting:

If there's a need for a two-floor building on the land, then the processor will be Dual-Core, Four-floor building will be Quad-Core and, Eight-Floor building will be an Octa-Core processor or a Multi-Core processor. Assuming that the construction of the building is complete and the employees are in it doing their work. Now considering the walls inside the building. If the walls are broader employees will find it challenging to move from one room to another which in-turn means we waste some part of our land as well and the constructed rooms will also be smaller. If a file has to be accessed by an employee, he should pass through those walls, which is difficult and he will end up wasting more energy. So, we need to keep the walls as thin as we can so that the employees will pass through them quickly and get your work done faster. Here's where the 14nm, 16nm, 28nm processor manufacturing processes play a vital role. These are the widths of walls. The lesser the width will be the faster the working speed and efficiency. Currently, Qualcomm is working on a fabrication process of 7nm which we will see in the upcoming Snapdragon 855 SoC.

The Final Step:

We have laid a great design by hiring a reputed architect. We constructed a building with walls and rooms in it. But we still need to attach doors to the walls, right?. The entries in the walls open and close at a fixed time. If they open and close fast, our employees can pass through from one room to another quickly. And hence, the speed of doing a particular task will be rapid. This is where we consider the frequencies (Ex: 1.2Ghz, 1.8Ghz, 2.5Ghz, etc.) also known as clock speeds. Remember, the higher the clock speed, the faster the opening and closing of doors. But.. if the doors open and close faster, then the power consumption will also be more.

Summing Up:

Just to recall everything that we have seen in this article.