The Birth of the Superphone
The latest smartphones on the market and being branded as superphones, but apart from a little skilful marketing does the term superphone really mean anything?
Smartphone manufacturers such as Samsung, HTC, LG and Motorola are starting to call their latest high technology handsets superphones, indicating that they have raise to bar so high that the term smartphone is inadequate to describe the revolutionary performance of these latest devices. However, many experts believe that they are really overstating the case. Although phones such as Samsung’s Galaxy S II have a higher performance than anything that has gone before, this does not take it into the superphone bracket.
A good parallel to take is in the world of non-mobile computing. Although the performance of our desktop computers has been improving roughly in accordance with “Moore’s Law”, which is essentially doubling every two years, we do not say that now we suddenly have a super-computer on our desks.
Super-computers are not simply evolutionary improvements to last year’s computer. They are revolutionary in that they often use different and novel technologies and achieve performances that dwarf the performances of ordinary desktops. For instance, taking the currently fastest supercomputer which is the Chinese produced Tianhe-1A, it uses 14,336 processors and 7,168 graphic processors. It occupies over 100 cabinets and weighs 155 tons; not exactly something you can put on your desk, especially when you consider that it needs 200 personnel to look after it.
Perhaps that is a little over the top, but for any computer to classify as a supercomputer it must have at least 10 times the performance of the best standard computer technology. Currently the best standard PC has a seven core 3.2 GHz processor so for a computer to qualify as a supercomputer it would need to incorporate something like seven 10 core processors and have 240 MB internal RAM.
So, until we have smartphones with similar levels of improvement over conventional smartphones, please let’s refrain from calling them superphones.
If you want to view the current mobile phones on the market visit www.dialaphone.co.uk.
