Processor

The processor is the heart or rather the brain of your smartphone; essentially what makes a smartphone smart. It does all the processing involved, be it when you run an applica¬tion or even calculations to translate the position of your finger on the touch screen. Current high end smartphone processors are clocked at 1GHz.

The Processor

Samsung, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments make these processors and are battling it out. Much like the desktop space, which is populated by names like Phenom, Core i and Athlon processors in the mobile space too at times acquire brand names. Samsung has Humming¬bird, and Apple A4 while Qualcomm calls them Snap¬dragon, Scorpion etc; and Texas Instruments, OMAP. These chips are all based on processor cores from ARM, a company doesn't manu¬facture chips but rather only designs the cores for such application processors. Some of ARM's designs include older generation cores such as the ARM9, ARM11 and the relatively recent Cortex- A8 and Cortex-A9. Manu¬facturers make their own chipsets (System on Chip design) often combining a GPU, cellular modem, and GPS on board. The QSD8250 chipset featured here for instance, used the Adreno 200 graphics solution and a Cortex-A8 core, together called Snap-dragon by Qualcomm