Friday, April 26, 2013

Samsung S4 Teardown: Lots of Qualcomm Chips

There's been a huge boom in smartphones over the last few years, with companies like Apple and Samsung growing to dominate the smartphone market. Southern California -- among consumers -- doesn't even enter into into the picture as a place which is leading the smartphone revolution. However, as a teardown of the Samsung Galaxy S4 released by iFixit show, Samsung's latest smartphone is actually mostly chips from Qualcomm (with a few other components thrown in). iFixit lists six major ICs from Qualcomm on the S4, including a Snapdragon Quad-Core CPU; power management and modem chips; and audio codec. Fellow, Southern California chip makers Broadcom (one chip in the S4, a NFC chip) and Skyworks (power amplifier)--also known for their use in smartphones--continue to be part of Samsung's latest design. Image: iFixit

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