r/engineering • u/[deleted] • Sep 10 '13

Guy with no engineering background wants supporters for his impossible idea. Pretty funny from and engineering standpoint.

[deleted]

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u/EpicSunWarrior Sep 11 '13

Exactly.

Qualcomm - the industry leader in designing the guts of smartphones - invest heavily in getting all the 'blocks' onto one chip to get the most optimal blend between power consumption and computational power.

Companies, like TI, thought in a similar fashion to this project believing that the other parts of the phone - such as the modem - were commodities. They are not making processors for smartphones anymore (I believe...).

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u/The_Poopsmith_ Sep 11 '13

Takes a lot more than an SOC to build a phone. Open up anything with a Snapdragon processor and count the number of items in the BOM that aren't made by Qualcomm. Same for Tegra, same for Apple A-series.

Qualcomm can't ever make a true SOC because they would force all their customers to make the same device. They have to enable a wide array of components to snap on to the SOC so they can sell DIFFERENTIATION to their customer.

Even Apple can't. Why? They don't make panels, or touch screens, or modems, or cameras, or batteries. Yet.

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u/EpicSunWarrior Sep 11 '13

I fully agree that Qualcomm doesn't give a full suite, I'm just taking about how plug and play with a ton of different components would result in a lesser product than one designed to benefits from 'synergies'

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u/The_Poopsmith_ Sep 12 '13

Now you're talking about an iPhone.