We all are so addicted to Smartphones and to performance that while selecting one, we forget to check the specification and see whether it will stand to our needs or not, and just one chip decides everything.
SOCs stand for System On Chip as the name suggests it has all the required peripherals on a single chip, an upgraded and powerful version of an micro controller. What peripherals it contains on it you ask? well it contains all the peripherals that make computer run like RAM, Processor, GPU etc.. So SOCs are important component and the deciding factor for your next smartphones. Unlike motherboard which also contains RAM, Processor and GPU on it SOCs are small, now in motherboard you can use custom peripherals but for SOCs you have only one choice no option for RAM upgradation, or ROM upgradation so take decision accordingly. Like Intel is to PC space who design and manufacture their chips, ARM is to Mobile space, unlike Intel it makes the processor reference design which is licensed to SoC makers such as Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and so on. Like we said before the SoC many player who use ARM’s design and make their own SoCs. Qualcomm is the leader in this space and is the player to beat.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon series of SoC’s were first seen in 2007 in phones such as HTC Tattoo and ever since the number of phone and tablet makers using Qualcomm’s soc. The current generation include Snapdragon 200, 400, 600 and 800. The latest SoC from Qualcomm is 820 and is considered to be most powerful SoC, covering all the problems of 810.
NVIDIA Tegra is the nextSoC which is quite popular. Thanks to NVIDIA for its proven record in graphics industry. These SoC are considered to give the best GPU performance. These SoC were first to bring 4+1 core configuration involves a low power companion core and the high power companion. The low power companion control when the phone is idle and the high power when you are doing extensive gaming and processing.
Samsung has its own lineup of SoCs named Exynos, Apple also has its own lineup of SoC the A series.
today’s generation are compared to be more powerful then the pc manufactured 5 years before. These SoC have Cortex A series processor, cortex A5 considered to be the lowest and the Cortex A57 considered to the most power, single core cortex A57 is capable of giving the power equivalent to 8 core cortex A5. These Cortex are the deciding factor of your smartphone. So when you go to buy a smartphone see which cortex they are using greater the number powerful the performance. Then Qualcomm came up with its own processor known as krait successor to the hugely popular scorpion processor. It increases the power consumption of the SoC resulting in increased performance. So single core krait processor are better than the dual core cortex A9.
Never go on the number of cores always look for the Processor and their series, look for the instruction set also whether it’s 32 bit or 64 bit, 64 bit will always give a better performance than the 32 bit.
