Research firm IHS shows what it costs Samsung to make the new smartphone.
Display advance
The S4 employs a full-HD active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) display from Samsung Display with a pixel format of 1,920 by 1,080. This compares to the 1,280 by 720 WXGA resolution display in the S III.
The S4’s HD display and touch-screen subsystem is estimated to carry a cost of $75.00, up from $65.00 for the S III. This represents the single largest area of cost increase for the S4 compared to the S III.
“While many brands have released smartphone models using full-HD LCD displays, the S4 represents the first with an AMOLED display at this resolution,” said Vinita Jakhanwal, director for small & medium displays at IHS. “Reaching a true pixel density greater than 300 ppi has been a challenge for AMOLED display makers. However, Samsung was able to enhance AMOLED display performance by implementing new technologies that also drove up the cost of the display.”
Apps processor beefs up its cores
For the apps processor in the HSPA+ version of the Galaxy S4, Samsung is believed to be employing an Exynos 5 Octa solution, an eight-core chip using its own design, and manufactured with Samsung’s own 28-nanometer process. This compares to the quad-core Exynos apps processor in the Galaxy S III. The cost of the Galaxy S4’s processor is estimated at $30.00, compared to $17.50 for the chip in the Galaxy S III.
The Galaxy S4’s eight-core Exynos processor uses ARM’s big.LITTLE microprocessor architecture. The architecture employs a hybrid approach generally referred to as heterogeneous computing, whereby two central processing units (CPUs)—a quad-core Cortex-A15 CPU and a quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU—are integrated into the same chip.
“With big.LITTLE, there is a computing and power consumption tradeoff, in which less computing-intensive tasks, such as phone calls and social media apps, can be handled by the more power-efficient but slower A7 cores,” said Wayne Lam, senior analyst for wireless communications at IHS. “This allows the bigger, more powerful and energy-draining A15 cores to remain idle when they are not needed, preserving battery life. The A15 cores go into action only for more computing-intensive applications, like video gaming or decoding video.”
This is a unique approach compared to Nvidia's 4+1 Tegra setup or even Qualcomm's asynchronous Krait-cores in the Snapdragon, where the processing cores are evenly matched.
The 4G LTE version of the Galaxy S4 employs a different apps processor and baseband, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, a quad-core apps processor and LTE radio solution. Samsung had a similar hardware differentiation with the LTE version of the Galaxy S III. Given the different apps processors between the Samsung Exynos-powered S4 and the Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Galaxy S4, some variances in the software capabilities and application performance for the two models are expected. However, that has yet to be verified by Samsung.
