A regular consumer usually examines a few specifications when shopping for a smartphone, such as camera pixel quality, operating system and multimedia capabilities, but a gadget enthusiast will examine specifications such as the processor, among other things, and this is precisely what the mobile industry has started to invest a heavier amount of attention into. With consumers becoming slightly more tech-savvy, the contribution of semiconductor companies have risen from hiding incognito to inching into the periphery of the spotlight.
For a while, quad-processors were widely recognized as the best indication of a top-notch benchmark for smartphones since consumers viewed a direct correlation between the numbers of cores in a processor to the quality. However, this has always been a gross oversimplification of the science behind processor technology, as evidenced by phones running Qualcomm’s dual-core processors which were at par, if not better, than numerous phones which stacked up cores. Qualcomm took a while to finally catch up with quad-core processors, the HTC Droid DNA and the LG Optimus G being the first phones to utilize them, and has thus achieved dominance in the industry with its S4 Snapdragon processors.
Tech companies all over have invested greatly into improving upon graphics capabilities and higher resolution displays by amping up the PPI (pixels per inch) of phone displays, such as Apple’s Retina display with 336 PPI and HTC’s Droid DNA with 440 PPI. However, increasing the pixel density means that a stronger processor is required to power the higher number of pixels. The biggest catch to better and stronger processors, however, is the rapid drain in battery life, which has been a major hurdle that processor companies have sought to overcome. The current benchmark for power efficiency is ARM architecture (behind almost all smartphone chips currently, except Intel Medfield).
Mobile manufacturers like Google’s Motorola Mobility have successfully attempted to resolve battery life issues by implementing larger batteries, like those used in the hefty Droid Razr Maxx HD. However Raj Talluri, Vice President of Product Management at Qualcomm’s CDMA technologies unit, pointed out the inadequacy of this solution since bigger batteries result in heavier and bigger devices, which doesn’t go down well with consumers due to the long-running trend of thinner devices. With bigger batteries obviously not feasible in the short-term, companies have turned to producing more efficient processors on a smaller manufacturing process (28nm is the smallest at the moment; the smaller you go, the greater the power efficiency). Hopefully, this trend will pay off when battery technology finally catches up.
