Guide to smartphone hardware (2/7): Graphics

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Want to know exactly what is inside your smartphone? Look no further than this massive 7-part guide that goes over all of it. Today's section goes over the all-important smartphone graphics processor

With such a huge range of smartphone hardware on the market today from vendors such as Samsung, HTC, Apple, Motorola, LG and more, it can be very confusing to keep up with what exactly is inside each of these devices. There are at least 10 different CPUs inside smartphones, many different GPUs, a seemingly endless combination of display hardware and a huge variety of other bits and bobs.

This multi-part guide is intended to help you understand each and every one of the critical components in your smartphone and how they compare to other hardware on the market. Each section is intended to give you all the necessary information about the hardware, and even more for the tech enthusiasts out there, so expect them all to be lengthy and filled with details.

Over the next several days and weeks we’ll be posting up another part of the guide. In today’s guide I’ll be looking at the second part of the smartphone SoC: the all-important and very powerful graphics processing unit (GPU).

• Part 1: Processors
  
• Part 2: Graphics (this article)
  
• Part 3: Memory & Storage (coming soon)
  
• Part 4: Displays (coming soon)
  
• Part 5: Connectivity & Sensors (coming soon)
  
• Part 6: Batteries (coming soon)
  
• Part 7: Cameras (coming soon)
  

Where is the graphics processor located?

If you read the previous article detailing smartphone processors you would have discovered that the actual processing cores are just one part of the overall system-on-a-chip that forms the basis of all modern phones. Along with said processing cores and other subsystems in the SoC you find the graphics processing unit, or GPU, in very close proximity to the processor.

The system-on-a-chip is quite a small chip that is used on the mainboard of a smartphone, and as the GPU is actually inside this chipset, to physically find the GPU while looking at the insides of a phone is near impossible. That said, if you manage to locate the SoC you are pretty much right as you would find it in there somewhere if you deconstructed the chip.

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