Know Your Smartphone #1 : SoC(System on a chip ) simplified and explained !!!

We all own a smartphone in today's world.In fact we can't even imagine a day without them.

Due to all the tech geeks out there and a new smartphone coming out almost every week we all know about those geeky specifications (Snapdragons,Apple Bionics,Mediateks ) but do we really know what principle they are based upon?
If you do then this post won't be of much help to you.But if you don't and you have some time to kill then read on...

First of all let me make this clear to you .Smartphones these days are as powerful as a PC and they definitely can perform all the tasks that your PC can .But as we know PCs are bulky and space consuming, then how does a smartphone or a tablet achieve that in such a small form factor?

The reason is because of the SoC (System on a chip ) concept.

So what is this System on a chip (SoC) concept?

Below is a image which represents a typical SoC . (img- courtesy :www.embedded-computers.com)

A system-on-a-chip (SoC) is a microchip with all the necessary electronic circuits and parts for a given system, such as a smartphone or wearable computer, on a single integrated circuit (IC).

In other words a system on a chip as the name suggests is the complete system minus some peripherals built on top a chip ,all the essential system built into it integrated into one.

If you see the image above you will see there is a section in the SoC labelled as CPU cores.This is the place all the Snapdragons ,Intel,Apple's A11 bionics ,Mediateks go .

The SoC also has in it a GPU(Graphics Processing unit ), on-board memory ,peripherals,sensors,Signal Processing unit ,connectivity modules among others.

One advantage of having everything on board a single chip is that the space consumption is less(as you would have guessed ) and efficiency is also better.

One important difference between PC and a smartphone is that smartphone chips are manufactured using ARM architecture while PCs are not.

This is where the smartphone or a tablet differs from a PC .Majority of PC manufacturers these days still do not use the SoC concept .But work is being made in that direction.

That is all for this post !!.
This post just gives a basic idea about an SoC .It is no where near a complete and exhaustive explanations of it.

I had some help from wikipedia.com and Whalts.com while creating this content .

Please leave your comments if you want to discuss something or point out a flaw.