Let us get to the bottom of it — Mobile Phone Specs — Processor
Buying a mobile phone best suited to your needs from the unlimited options available on e-marketplaces is a new age problem. And to solve this new age problem, we need to break open all the tech terminologies and understand what Marquees Brownlees means when he talks about clock speeds or when Geeky Ranjit dissects the performance of a Snapdragon.
To begin with, I have to tell you that I am no expert on the matter and am just a regular person who dropped her phone in water and set about trying to buy the perfect fit mobile phone that her son can then drop in water.
First things first:
The Processor — This is the brain of the mobile phone. That is the long and short of it. And this is how it looks:
And this is the story of how it all began:
This is a transistor. What it does is Calculation. And these calculations are done in Binary which are basically 0s and 1s. While transistors on their own have a history that warrants a different post, what a regular person like you and me need to understand is that they were pretty big back when they were first created and the engineers who worked on it got it down to a size so small that they can now fit millions of them into a chip the size of your finger nail. The smaller the transistor, the more number they can fit on a chip and more are the calculations they can do without heating up.
So these transistors are packed into cores. Now, imagine an Octopus. Did you know that each of their arms have a brain of their own? Well, they do and in our commoner terms, that’s an octa-core processor. I wonder how many cores a multi-tasking mum has. Although I can imagine that multi-tasking mums have very poor cooling systems.
And now to the topic in Question, How is a processor performance measured?
In Hertz
Yep, that’s the guy.
Now, Hertz means cycles per second. What is a cycle? That is the basic unit of a task. And the specs of a processor is measured in Giga Hertz. So when someone talks about a 1GHz processor, that means it can execute 1 billion little tasks per second.
In 2020, the major players in microprocessors for mobile phones are Snapdragon (Commonly used in Android phones) by Qualcomm and the A series bionic chips (in Iphones) by Apple.
This Showdown!
There are people out there who run these systems against each other for different tasks and measure performance. There are also various factors to the said performance. For example: The processor might be fast. But it might drain out the battery. So, if your major activity is gaming, the best option is to go for a processor of high performance. But, if like me, you are a mom whose toddler has figured out how to unplug the charger from the phone, go for the processor which gives a better battery output.
More in the next post,
Nasrin
Sources:
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