so as we were sitting down to review this episode of fast as possible I saw
the folder name for the project and I asked John what is a system on a chip
and he replied I'm glad you asked it's
all in the script we're about to go over so uh here we go then we are now in an
era where a lot of us expect the
smartphones we carry around in our pockets to do most of the things a PC
can I mean the Samsung Galaxy even has a
setting for multiamp anti-aliasing so your mobile games will
look nicer but given that Flagship phones are much smaller than even the
most compact PCS how have they grown
from Novelties that can't even copy paste to do it all devices in only about
10 years well much of the growth has been driven by advancements in systems
on a chip commonly called s so's well
hold on a second lonus my phone isn't a system on chip it has a screen and
buttons and a case with rhinestones on it well when I say system I'm talking
about all the crucial inerts that a phone or a tablet needs to function like
processors memory and storage and IO
controllers and if you've ever built or upgraded a desktop PC what you'll know
is that for the most part these functions are all handled by different
components that you have to either physically install separately or are
installed separately on something like a motherboard an S so by contrast
integrates multiple or even all of these
functions into one piece of silicon
that's the same size or even smaller than a conventional
CPU but how can all of this stuff fit
onto just one chip well remember that
because phones and tablets are mobile devices that spend most of their lives
running off of a battery a lot of the components inside have to suck less
power and produce less heat I mean a
phone with a 10-minute battery life that feels like a hot stove top wouldn't do
you much good would it so this means
that manufacturers have to save energy
somehow which usually translates to less
powerful components with fewer transistors which makes them physically
smaller but just because components on an so don't pack the punch of their
desktop PC counterparts doesn't mean that they're bad in fact many mid-range
and higher end s so's deliver very smooth performance in part because their
CPUs use the ARM architecture which runs
a smaller simpler instruction set to make processing easier though perhaps
less versatile and you can learn more about ARM CPUs in this video and because
mobile apps and and operating systems like iOS and Android are written for
these CPUs that means that you're not waiting around three times longer for
your phone to do something even though your s so might be several times less
powerful than your desktop rig and if you're an Apple fan their s so's take
the concept of less is more even further
because unlike Android s so's which have
to work with tons of different devices and Brands Apple's s so's only need to
work with their own hardware and their own software so iOS has been further
optimized to run well on apple chips
that are at times less impressive sounding than their Android equivalents
on paper for example the new Apple A10
so inside the iPhone 7 is the first quad
core chip we've seen in an i device when Androids have been available with eight
core chips for years now and we're even seeing the same integration Concept in
desktops it's not limited to S so's although PCS aren't packing everything
from RAM to LTE communication logic onto
the die or even the package for that matter and the trend towards this goes
back decades even with Intel being the first to move the cash which used to be
an external chip that you plugged in onto the CPU and AMD's more recent
integration of the memory controller into the CPU die which used to be a
separate chip on the motherboard called the Northbridge this might have seemed
at first glance like they were just increasing the CPU's complexity for the
sake of it when we'd rather just have a bigger more powerful CPU and keep all
that stuff offboard but in reality the
reduction in cash and memory access latency from getting them closer
together more than compensates for the wasted die space and additional cost and
this is even true of onboard graphics with better on chip gpus now being
pushed as an all-in-one solution for light to moderate gaming as we've seen
with Intel's Iris Pro graphics and AMD's Apu series not quite the same as a full
fat graphics card but who knows with the way things are going maybe one day we
will have entire systems the size of a
postage stamp or you know failing that even just a modern CPU that can max out
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Techquickie in the how did You Hear About Us section thanks for watching
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