Gadgetory

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 multisample 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 ten years well much of the growth has been driven by advancements in systems on a chip commonly called SOC s well hold on a second Linus my phone isn't a system on a chip it has a screen and buttons in a case with rhinestones on it well when I say system I'm talking about all the crucial innards that a phone or a tablet needs to function like processors memory and storage and i/o 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 and SOC 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 would 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 SOC 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 SOC a 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 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 SOC might be several times less powerful than your desktop rig and if you're an Apple fan there SOC s take the concept of less is more even further because unlike android SOC s which have to work with tons of different devices and brands apples SOC 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 a 10 SOC inside the iPhone 7 is the first quad-core chip we've seen in an iDevice 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 SOC s although pcs aren't packing everything from ran 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 cache which used to be an external chip that you plugged in onto the CPU and a these 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 CPUs complexity for the sake of it when we'd rather just have a bigger more powerful CPU and keep all that stuff off board but in reality the reduction in cache 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 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 crisis speaking of postage stamps ah Thank You Internet we hardly ever need those anymore and thanks to the growth of the internet there have never been more opportunities for the self-employed and to meet this need freshbooks is excited to announce an all-new version of their cloud accounting software it's been redesigned for the way that you work and it's the simplest easiest way to be more productive more organized and 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