Powering the Power: Your Chipset
Fed up with my mom’s constant nagging and demolishing remarks on our generation’s infatuation with smartphones, I decided it was enough. Commenting on the shady association of our chargers to the phone’s charging point and the plug point had become her vent for letting the frustration out. According to her, charging the phones continuously led to skyrocketing electricity bills and wastage.
And for me, proving this notion false had become a mission. So, I took out my arsenals — namely my phone, and, of course, the charger, plugged in the modem and took a dive in the dangerous world of research. I was blessed enough with the mighty Internet, as I was able to pull out the facts in a jiffy.
My discovery was sort of, both, bitter and sweet. So were my mother’s notions. As hard it is for me to admit, some part of my mom’s ideology still holds certain solid ground. Let me explain how.
It is definitely true that charging smartphones have a negligible impact on your electricity bills, i.e. if left overnight for charging, it will cost less than a dollar yearly. Upon learning this, I found a lot of hope and reason to counter my mom. So her cost evaluation of the “smartphone charging” was completely absurd and was conquered.
But, the other side of this issue was really horrifying. When considered on a universal level, my smartphone consumes as much energy as a 2-star refrigerator. You are bound to ask how. Well, the global ICT (Information-Communication Technologies) ecosystem uses about 1500 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, which is equal to the electricity used by Japan and Germany combined.
So, her prophecy that smartphones do waste a hell lot of energy, unknowingly, turned out to be correct. Which led me to think, what should we do in such a case? Obviously, one can easily get away by saying reduce the usage. But this solution isn’t that simple. Since the ICT have become the backbone of our lives, reducing is not the solution we can afford.
But reforming surely is !!
A huge amount of energy is required to run the big data and cloud centres, as well as in the transfer of data. Low-performance, with inefficient processing capabilities of the smartphones, become a bottleneck for these stations and when coupled with the heat energy losses, this energy drain becomes hazardous. So, in order to curb energy losses, and optimize the data transfer mechanisms, improving the current iteration of technology in smartphones becomes vital.
Thankfully, Smartphones are being upgraded to the utmost level due to recent advancements in technology. Still, there is a lot of scope for improving the operating efficiency and reducing the heating losses. The amount of daily tasks that we carry out has splurged exponentially and will continue to rise further. Thus, the need of the hour is to optimize the processors and chipsets, that can increase the speed, efficiency and energy saving capacity of these smartphones.
A great deal of innovation has been witnessed in the betterment of the SoCs, that yields the power of the CPU, GPU, and very recently, AI accelerators together. SoCs provides the platform for various functionalities like the processing unit, camera system, AI neural systems etc to function together, without utilizing more space and resources. The upcoming era of these chipsets aims to improve the energy efficiency, machine learning and AI aspects of our smartphones.
There is a solid proportionality between better SoCs and these aspects. After scouting for various types of hardware available to impact and cut down the energy costs, I stumbled upon a very recent and interesting technology — CorePilot 4.0. The CorePilot 4.0 is a module on the latest MediaTek Helio P60 series SoCs, with avant-garde abilities to revolutionize the entire landscape of SoC chipsets.
Why CorePilot stands out is a fair question!! The CorePilot 4.0 provides sustained high performance with great power efficiency, with the help of Energy efficient TSMC 12nm FinFET production process. This assists Helio P60 to deliver precise power to the device for heavy gaming, video or even multitasking applications. It also monitors UX/UI, task scheduling, and power-performance optimization to reach unprecedented performance horizons affordably.
Compared to its predecessors, P60 can now deliver 70% higher performance and up to 12% overall power saving for even heavy-duty and high-end devices. And it’s direct impact will be on the battery life that can significantly cut the utility costs. Although, my individual savings won’t move a grain, when considered on a universal level, results can be humongous.
Consumers having smartphones with 50% longer battery life cut industry’s annual greenhouse gas emissions by an amount corresponding to nearly 5 million American homes. With increased processing power, and improved multitasking features, SoCs like Helio P60 will drastically reduce power consumptions, coaxing the stakeholders to power mobile base stations and big data centres to run on renewable energy. Better phones will also impact our usage of devices like the computers, and laptops, to cut out their energy requirements drastically.
Conclusion
These energy-related issues demand the attention of masses, and the need of the hour is to optimize and reduce our requirements, for a better future. And, we as consumers, can play a major role in improving our decision making by learning more about the integrities of our smartphones, like SoCs and chipsets. These efforts can help everyone find or even, develop amazing technical marvels, to curb this problem.
