1.

INTRODUCTION:
As mobile phones become more versatile, they are used for various purposes. Smartphones
hardware mainly concerned with application processors, Random Access memory (RAM),
Energy consumption and additional real-time features like accelerometer etc. Processors that are
made for mobile phones are facing some restriction in terms of power, cost and real time
computational requirements which had been overcome by new generation high performance
processor chips. the performance related aspects are overseen nowadays more and more due to
the rapid growth of usage of smart phones in day to day life .Memory sizes are growing linearly
in every upcoming release of new smartphones so that users can be attracted towards their
product. In mobile phones, batteries are restricted to the their size and weight of the device.
Modern high end devices like smartphones are performing computer like functionalities which
squeezes out the energy from the small size battery and deepens the need for effective energy
management. Therefore, this paper mainly concentrates on the comparisons of Hardware
components of evolving smartphones in 21st century.This paper is organized as follows: Section
2 describes about the processor chip evolution in smart phones history and how they cope up
with the current trends. Section 3 depicts about the memory that are used in smart phones and
their linear evolution when compared to old phones. Finally, Section 4 talks about the additional
features of smart phones and the conclusion.
2. MOBILE PROCESSORS TRENDS:
There are many distinctions in mobile processors to implement in smart phones they are based
on trends, technologies and performance basis.

2.1 DSP(Digital signal Processor) Architectures

DSP Architecture In this type of architecture we have two types based on release and timeline
they are as follows (a) Traditional DSP(Digital signal Processor) Architectures and (b) Modern
DSP Architecture. In traditional DSP Architecture is designed in single standalone integrated
circuits (ICs), in this we can program DSP in such a way these ICs can be used in wireless
handsets for digital cellular telephony. Modern DSP Architecture are evolved for Smart phones,
which performs parallel processing. The effective use of Modern DSP Architecture is
computational power is less due to chip fabrication.
2.2 System on Chip (SOC) Architecture
Smart phone devices architecture become more simpler with using System on Chip. DSP hybrid
Architecture version can handle the responsiveness in the device to improve the performance. In
SOC architecture provides the flexibility of having high performance with low power design. To
speed up the operations of smart phones many companies had done instruction set
customizations. Most of the smart phones nowadays using single or dual cores SOCs instead.
Some experimental results shows that dual core SOCs can achieve best results than Quad core
SOCs.
2.3 ARM ( Advanced RISC Machines)Processors
ARM processors are used in smart phones because of less power consumption and better
performance, its basically a 32 bit instruction set which is based on Reduced instruction set
computing (RISC) architecture. The first ARM architecture version is ARMv5 used for low end
smart phones, proceeds with ARMv6, ARMv7, ARMv8. ARMv8 is the latest version which
contains hardware floating point unit which provides speed improvement in smart phones. A

single core AMR cortex v8 was clocked with 1.4GHz which is reasonable at the year 2011 but
now in 2014 AMR processors are clocked with 3GHz and 64 bit AMR processors performs twice
faster as compared to 32 bit AMR processors therefore the performance increases drastically for
64 bit ARM chip up to 50% than 32 bit ARM chip.
2.4 Qualcomm Snapdragon
Snapdragon comes under the family of SOC architecture provided by Qualcomm. Snapdragon is
have same feature as ARM but with an included feature is utilizing Single instruction, multiple
data (SIMD). Qualcomm Snapdragon improves graphics performance of smartphone games.it is
the first to introduce a 28nm processor in 2012. In 2013 Qualcomm Snapdragon released
Snapdragon 800 processor which beats all the processors in the field of smart phones.
Snapdragon 800 provides opening apps in lighting speed and web browsers, outstanding graphics
and outstanding battery life, ultra HD video, multiple HD audio.
2.5 NVidias Tegra Processors
Tegra is again SOC architecture which is developed by NVidias. it includes ARM architecture ,
graphic processing unit and memory controllers. NvidiaTegra 4 processor is a quad core SOC
with improved performance. According to the reports of performance test NvidiaTegra SOCs
beats the new Qualcomm snapdragon processors. NVidia is technically faster but when
comparison comes to power efficiency Qualcomm snapdragon wins. New Smartphones are
equipped with latest and powerful processor which can maintain multiple applications at a time.
let us see the comparison of different processor performance using the software called Geek
bench 3, which calculates the benchmark using a baseline score of 2500 (which is the score of an
Intel Core i5)[]. More the score of benchmark more is the performance. Below figures shows the

android operating system processors benchmarks which reflects the best processors according to
2015.

Figure 1: Represents the Android Operating system (OS) processors benchmarks.[]

3. Smartphone Memory:
The enormous growth of smartphone users led to increase the demand of app developers
which in turn increases the demand of memory space in smartphones. The smart phone are
provided with two types of memory Internal flash storage and External SD card, including these two we
have limited amount of RAM. Internal flash memories are types of electronically erasable programmable
read-only memory (EEPROM), to bring back the data it needs power. This EEPROM erases data as a
bunch of blocks so that it's suitable for applications where huge amount of data requires time to time
updating. Flash chip contains cells protected by floating gates. Flash memory uses two distinct logical
technologies NOR and NAND. NOR is known for providing High Speed reading, writing and access.
The main purpose of NOR flash is to store Operating system(OS). NAND flash reads and writes
consecutively at high speed which in turn handles a single block of data called pages. NAND flash reads
quicker than it writes and transfers the whole page of data. Many reviews dont consider internal NAND
storage speed as specified. However it a key factor for the smooth performance of android. To compare

the NAND performance of most popular smart phones we use AndroBench tool which tests the sequential
and random speed. This Testing is categorized into two different tests first is sequential speeds and
random reads where we have large amounts of data reads or writes to the storage for an example if we are
transferring a movie which is stored in sequential block of memory. so, the faster the results are , Faster is
the ability to write or read a file. The second one measures the speed of reads and writes of NAND
storage in consecutive blocks. In these tests also greater the speed betters the frame rates. Lets see the
results of first and second test.

Figure 2: Represents the reading and writing speed of different smart phones with 256kb file.[]

Figure 3: Represents the reading and writing speed of different smart phones with 4kb file.[]
Android and Apple uses the SQLite database to store the structured data in primary means of
storage. SQLite is a transactional database that is light weight.so, it occupies less amount of

memory space.so applications which are have querying, retrieving and searching functions uses
one or more SQLite database. Apple iOS core data is a data model which is built on the top of
SQLite which provides access to the applications to do operations like save, restore, undo and
redo. when the focus shifts to external storage we are curious about larger the memory size faster
the smartphone but in reality it won't. Smartphones comes with two different and standard
memory cards called mini and micro-SD sizes, they may vary in storage capacities from 16MB
to 2TB. Below are the lists of SD cards with performances on desktop and smartphones with
respect to the reading and Writing speeds.

Table 1: Shows the SD card brands cost as well as their performance on desktop and phone.[]
4. Additional features of smart phones:
Additional feature like accelerometer and electronic compass implementation in smartphones
faced many hurdles to perfectly predict the walking speed and orientation of smartphone users.
At first the map is being downloaded based on the user location and track the user. Using the
Assistance GPS reading, phone calculates the location of user frequently. Implementation of
accelerometer and electronic compass which combined to form CompAcc is first implemented
on Nokia N95 and it works well for small range of 11m.
Conclusion :
Different vendors are working for better smartphones which contains powerful processor chip
though all the processors are ARM based they quietly design with different name by cellular

companies. New generation inbuilt flash memories are huge like 3-4GB .Though we achieved
enough progress in smart phone development some factors like low power consumption, user
interface usability , huge memory usage by applications etc. are some of the key factors which
still have to be improved to achieve optimum level of satisfaction in smartphone industry.

[]Kim, H., Agrawal, N., and Ungureanu, C. Revisiting storage for smartphones. In
Proc. FAST 2012, USENIX Assoc. (2012).