Whenever you want to buy a smartphone, the second if not the first most important factor is the processor of the smartphone. Companies often market their products by listing all the features of the processor and use terminologies that are little known to the consumers. Here’s a break down of all the things you need to know about the smartphone processor so that you can be better prepared to choose the right one.
For instance, let us consider Mediatek Helio G90T processor that powers Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 8 Pro. If you go on to the product’s website or decide to go for an offline market purchase, you will see the configuration like this:
CORES
A core is a unit of processing power that is responsible to execute instructions given by the user. When you tap on the app icon it launches the app but for the processor, the whole process of launching an app can essentially be broken down into small mathematical operations that a core can execute. It can execute millions of them in a second. So, in a nutshell, more cores mean more instructions getting executed in a second which translates to performance.
The cores work in parallel to complete a task faster. For example, in the Flipkart app, we can see multiple images of different products loading at the same time. A core might be executing instruction to load one image and the other one doing the same for another image. Had there been a single-core processor each image had to wait for the other one to load completely. This would take more time to load hence bad user experience. The terminology of the cores goes like this: Dual-core (2 cores), Quad-core (4 cores), and Octa-core (8 cores)
Most of the smartphones these days come with octa-core processors. The cores need not be of the same power. In order to have a balance of both power and battery efficiency there low power but less power consuming cores and high power but more battery consuming cores. In the case of Helio G90T, we have 2 cores that are more powerful (2x -2.05GHz) and 6 cores which are less powerful (6X – 2.0GHz). Let’s now look into the unit which is used to measure the speed of a core i.e GHz.
Clock Speed – measured in GHz
To understand clock speed we need to understand what is a processing cycle. A processing-cycle is a sequence of operations namely fetch, decode, execute and store. These units of sequences are responsible to execute a small mathematical operation which as a collection performs a complex task, for instance, opening an application. 1Hz means it will take one second for the processor to execute one processing cycle. 1GHz means a processor can perform one billion processing cycles.
In other words, higher clock speed translates to more instructions getting execute per second hence more performance and less loading times. This, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that a 2Ghz processor will be twice as faster as 1Ghz processor because different processors are based on different architectures and hence a processor may take more processing cycles to execute an instruction than the other processor. This brings us to our next point supplier of cores.
Supplier of cores
Processors used in smartphones are more different than similar to those used in modern computers like Intel Core i7, AMD Ryzen. These chips are huge battery drainers and can’t be used in smartphones. Using a Ryzen processor will drain out the smartphone’s battery in very few hours if not in minutes though their performance power is massive. This calls for battery optimized processors and ARM which stands for Advanced RISC Machine is the industry’s leading supplier who designs and manufactures the cores based on RISC architecture.
So, ARM is essentially a company that manufactures cores for processors while Cortex A55, Cortex A76, etc. are the models of the cores. These cores are used by Mediatek and earlier models like Cortex A57 and Cortex A53 suffered from overheating problems which led to the downfall of smartphones like Samsung Galaxy S6 and Samsung Galaxy Note 5. Mediatek uses Cortex cores whereas Qualcomm uses its own in-house Kyro cores which are also based on RISC architecture.
GPU
GPU stands for the graphics processing unit. GPU is a separate processor reserved for rendering graphics while playing games. When we play a game there are multiple things happening at the same time for instance in PUBG there could be things like rainfall, enclosing of the zone, movement of cars and people.
Now the amount of calculation power needed to perform all these tasks at the same time can be problematic for a processor that has only a few cores. We actually require more parallel power rather than more processing power for rendering graphics and this where GPUs come into play.
A GPU is made up of a large number of cores (24 in case of Mali G-76) and provides more parallel execution for high graphics performance. Though the cores are less powerful in a GPU(800 MHz) compared with the cores of a processor(2 GHz). The GPUs manufactured by ARM are known by the name of Mali-Gxx and the ones manufactured by Qualcomm goes by the name of Adreno.
I hope you have developed a better understanding of a smartphone processor and next time when you are buying a smartphone you will have a better idea about the specifications of the processor. Have a great buy!
Questions? Hit them in the comment section below.
