iPhone experts?

[SmilesRising]

i need to know how a iPhone works! how the CPU and all that works and communicates with other parts.. please help.

[Bsmith]

hmm... with pixy magic and unicorn dust I think?

 

No seriously, iPhone's work the same as other phones, they are only more efficient in their locked down specs/environment. There is nothing too special about them.

[SmilesRising]

Just now, Bsmith said:

hmm... with pixy magic and unicorn dust I think?

 

No seriously, iPhone's work the same as other phones, they are only more efficient in their locked down specs/environment. There is nothing too special about them.

then i need to know how a smartphone works..

[Bsmith]

1 minute ago, smiles rising said:

then i need to know how a smartphone works..

just like a PC, everything communicates with each other and those processes get controlled by the CPU mainly and visual output get's controlled by the GPU.

[GreezyJeezy]

Just like any other device that uses a CPU and all that, it's just a tiny computer.

 

[SmilesRising]

1 minute ago, Bsmith said:

just like a PC, everything communicates with each other and those processes get controlled by the CPU mainly and visual output get's controlled by the GPU.

i need more advanced than that...

[manikyath]

well.. you have a battery, some dedicated hardware for monitoring the battery to make sure it doesnt become thermite, you have a cpu and gpu, some ram, some flash storage, two cameras, a touch screen, and some buttons.

 

 

those are all connected in a way they can communicate, slap an OS on top of that, and good to go.

EDIT: actually, you could think of it like how a pc works, but MUCH smaller.

[SmilesRising]

2 minutes ago, manikyath said:

well.. you have a battery, some dedicated hardware for monitoring the battery to make sure it doesnt become thermite, you have a cpu and gpu, some ram, some flash storage, two cameras, a touch screen, and some buttons.

 

 

those are all connected in a way they can communicate, slap an OS on top of that, and good to go.

yeah thats a way to simple explanation. i need some advanced shit.. 

[manikyath]

Just now, smiles rising said:

yeah thats a way to simple explanation. i need some advanced shit.. 

how about you tell us what you need said knowledge for, because we're all just guesstimating at what you need to know.

 

if you want some in-depth stuff, look at a raspberry pi, thats basicly a phone without the battery and touch screen.

[SmilesRising]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

how about you tell us what you need said knowledge for, because we're all just guesstimating at what you need to know.

 

if you want some in-depth stuff, look at a raspberry pi, thats basicly a phone without the battery and touch screen.

i need to explain how a phone (iPhone) works. ive explained how a call is made and how its made in factorys but now i need to explain how it works. How does the CPU work and how does the GPU work. How is it all connected. What the CPU does and such

[ChrisCross]

nobody can explain the holy potato! 

 

but for real check out the teckquickie youtube channel. there you can find most of the answers. 

[Bsmith]

2 minutes ago, smiles rising said:

i need to explain how a phone (iPhone) works. ive explained how a call is made and how its made in factorys but now i need to explain how it works. How does the CPU work and how does the GPU work. How is it all connected. What the CPU does and such

 

Well you are putting yourself in a hard place, explaining all that stuff would require the person explained to it to understand advanced electronics on a theoretical scale where the size of electrons come into play.

I will give it a try though.

 

example:

You are downloading a new app.

You press the download button on your screen, the signal get's passed through the CPU, the CPU sends a electrical signal to your wifi chip to start the download and send through the RAM a signal for the memory to select space to store the content.

While the content comes in at the wifi chip it signals to the CPU how much data packets it has received, your CPU signals this trough it's personal cache to the GPU which displays that amount on your screen. In the meantime the data goes through your RAM to your flash memory where it get's stored in the selected places for it.
When the final packet has been received an other signal gets send that stops the downloading, now the leftover data that hasn't been processed yet by your memory has to be written of and additional communication protocols get installed where needed.

When all done your screen will show the app icon that you can then press on to open the app, which sends a signal to your CPU that signals the GPU to display the data from your flash memory by streaming it through the RAM memory.

 

The CPU, GPU, RAM, memory and other connections are connected to each other by the motherboard.
They run through electrical lines that have to be of specific lengths to ensure that the signals arrive at the right times and not to early or to late, because this could cause the CPU to crash.

 

This is as advanced I can explain it.

If you want to know stuff about how the CPU manages all those things, then google CPU protocols.

 

[GreezyJeezy]

Watch as fast as possible videos on YouTube about how computer parts cummiamate with eat hotter, it's pretty much the same just on a smaller scale 

[SmilesRising]

2 minutes ago, Bsmith said:

 

Well you are putting yourself in a hard place, explaining all that stuff would require the person explained to it to understand advanced electronics on a theoretical scale where the size of electrons come into play.

I will give it a try though.

 

example:

You are downloading a new app.

You press the download button on your screen, the signal get's passed through the CPU, the CPU sends a electrical signal to your wifi chip to start the download and send through the RAM a signal for the memory to select space to store the content.

While the content comes in at the wifi chip it signals to the CPU how much data packets it has received, your CPU signals this trough it's personal cache to the GPU which displays that amount on your screen. In the meantime the data goes through your RAM to your flash memory where it get's stored in the selected places for it.
When the final packet has been received an other signal gets send that stops the downloading, now the leftover data that hasn't been processed yet by your memory has to be written of and additional communication protocols get installed where needed.

When all done your screen will show the app icon that you can then press on to open the app, which sends a signal to your CPU that signals the GPU to display the data from your flash memory by streaming it through the RAM memory.

 

The CPU, GPU, RAM, memory and other connections are connected to each other by the motherboard.
They run through electrical lines that have to be of specific lengths to ensure that the signals arrive at the right times and not to early or to late, because this could cause the CPU to crash.

 

This is as advanced I can explain it.

If you want to know stuff about how the CPU manages all those things, then google CPU protocols.

 

well my teacher has studied on university and all that stuff so i guess he knows a bit.. Thanks!

[spellmanuk]

7 minutes ago, smiles rising said:

well my teacher has studied on university and all that stuff so i guess he knows a bit.. Thanks!

Why don't you quit being lazy and go look it up yourself there plenty to go at for example tech quickly videos from ltt themselves as well as the millions of of other articles. If you go and actually learn it for yourself instead of asking other people for the answers you might be better off coz if you don't know how it works now and go on to do more advanced stuff later your doing to be fucked let's be honest.

 

sorry if I sound like I'm being hard on you I'm just telling you the truth. 

[Hamosch]

Don't really know what kind of answers you expect here as explaining how a phone/computer works with any level of detail requires A LOT of knowledge

 

Here's a crash course on how modern CPUs are designed in broad strokes

 

http://www.lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/

[SmilesRising]

14 minutes ago, peej said:

Why don't you quit being lazy and go look it up yourself there plenty to go at for example tech quickly videos from ltt themselves as well as the millions of of other articles. If you go and actually learn it for yourself instead of asking other people for the answers you might be better off coz if you don't know how it works now and go on to do more advanced stuff later your doing to be fucked let's be honest.

 

sorry if I sound like I'm being hard on you I'm just telling you the truth. 

well i thought that ive received help here before and it worked out fine that i could ask again..

[spellmanuk]

5 minutes ago, smiles rising said:

well i thought that ive received help here before and it worked out fine that i could ask again..

Yeah and that's fine that what the for is about but if this is for school are you really learning the stuff you need to know I'm only saying this coz when I was a kid I did this and just asked everyone else for the answers apnever actually learned anything then when it came time to do exams I failed so hard that I had to go retake everything the next year and did it properly 

[Bsmith]

1 hour ago, smiles rising said:

well my teacher has studied on university and all that stuff so i guess he knows a bit.. Thanks!

 

then why not ask him/her? I mean teacher are there to teach you, it will only be in your disregard to show off with knowledge you don't own.

[SmilesRising]

4 minutes ago, Bsmith said:

 

then why not ask him/her? I mean teacher are there to teach you, it will only be in your disregard to show off with knowledge you don't own.

hes on vacation.. so im on my own.. hes coming back this week but i cant wait that long

[LAwLz]

OP, I don't think you realize how advanced and complex a phone is.

You can't just "explain it". Basically each and every component in a phone is a huge field that you could study for many years. To adequately answer your questions you would probably need to study for several years, and you would still just have scraped the surface.

 

 

To make it a bit more clear, let's assume that you were just asking about the iPhone camera. That is just a single module out of several in the iPhone. In order to understand how that works we would first need to understand a decent amount of physics. More specifically, how light works and interacts with things. That is needed to explain how the lens works. Once we know the fundamentals of lenses we can start talking about how the iPhone's specific lens works. What type of lens is it, what properties does it have, how does things like the coatings work and so on. But that's not it. How does the VCM, the component that moves the lens around to get focus work?

 

So now we got a moderate amount of knowledge about the lens. Now it's time to look at the sensor. For that we get again need to start with physics, because at the most fundamental level we are talking about light hitting photosensitive elements which gets turned into electrical signals. When we know how that works we can move on to looking at the iPhone's sensor in particular. It is a back-illuminated sensor. What does that mean and how is that different from other types of sensors? What size is it and why does that matter? How does the focus work?

 

So let's assume that we got both those things out of the way now. We should now move on to the ISP, the image signal processor. It handles a wide variety of things such a demosaicing (how does that work?), it handles a lot of the automatic features we take for granted (auto white balance, auto focus, and so on, how do those work?), it applies corrections for things such as lens imperfections (things such as vingetting). It is responsible for the encoding as well, if you want it to be a JPEG, or a RAW file like DNG. How do those file formats work? What are their strengths and weaknesses?

 

But we are still not done. All of these things are controlled by firmwares and functions in the OS. How do those work? They were written in some language like C, so we should learn about that. But the components don't know how to interpret C, so we also need to understand what a compiler is and how that works. When we are done with that we will be down to machine language. Better learn assembly too! But we are still not done, because we will have to learn how the hardware interprets all the assembly commands. Now that we are down at this low level we should also look into how the actual hardware works. How does transistors work, how do all the logical gates work and how do they end up making different functions possible?

 

 

Not even all the things I listed would be enough to fully understand how the camera in the iPhone works perfectly. There are a ton of small details you need to understand too. According to Apple they had 800 people working on the camera alone. It is made up of over 200 individual parts. I don't think any one of those 800 people fully understand every aspect of the camera. It is so complex that you need an entire team that are specialized in different areas to develop it.

 

I have only talked about the camera mind you. It is just one out of many modules that makes up an iPhone. Things like the SoC is a MUCH bigger subject which would require even more research to fully understand.

 

Edit:

I got two suggestions for you:

1) Do your own research. Asking to be spoon-fed information is not only bad manners, but it is also harmful because you end up not learning as much, and you don't learn the (very important) skill of looking up information for yourself. I am not sure about other schools, but at my university we do not get any help from the teachers unless we can explain what we tried and what the results were before going to ask them for help. If they don't think we have tried hard enough yet we don't get any help.

 

2) Don't ask such broad questions. If you want a good answer you need to narrow it down. Would you ask your teacher to explain the entire concept of math and everything it encompasses to you? No of course not. You would ask him to explain how to solve a particular problem or explain a specific concept. Same thing applies here. Even asking "how does an SoC work" is way too broad. You need to ask things like "how does the modem work", or "how is ARM different from x86".

 

 

Suggestion 1 will help you with suggestion 2, because if you do your own research first you will not have to ask questions like:

"How does a lens work".

Instead you would be able to ask questions like:

"I was reading about camera optics on this website (link to website) but I don't fully understand their explanation of X. I know that Y and Z work this way, but how does that affect X?"

The answers you get will be easier for the people answering to write (because they know what info you need to learn about), they will be more informative (because they know what boundaries to stay within to make you understand the concept) and you will learn more from it.

[Mrhappyjolly]

it would help if you could tell us why you are asking, are you writing a report on phones or doing research? If you tell us why we'll have some context as to what you are after. 

[SmilesRising]

6 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

OP, I don't think you realize how advanced and complex a phone is.

You can't just "explain it". Basically each and every component in a phone is a huge field that you could study for many years. To adequately answer your questions you would probably need to study for several years, and you would still just have scraped the surface.

 

 

To make it a bit more clear, let's assume that you were just asking about the iPhone camera. That is just a single module out of several in the iPhone. In order to understand how that works we would first need to understand a decent amount of physics. More specifically, how light works and interacts with things. That is needed to explain how the lens works. Once we know the fundamentals of lenses we can start talking about how the iPhone's specific lens works. What type of lens is it, what properties does it have, how does things like the coatings work and so on. But that's not it. How does the VCM, the component that moves the lens around to get focus work?

 

So now we got a moderate amount of knowledge about the lens. Now it's time to look at the sensor. For that we get again need to start with physics, because at the most fundamental level we are talking about light hitting photosensitive elements which gets turned into electrical signals. When we know how that works we can move on to looking at the iPhone's sensor in particular. It is a back-illuminated sensor. What does that mean and how is that different from other types of sensors? What size is it and why does that matter? How does the focus work?

 

So let's assume that we got both those things out of the way now. We should now move on to the ISP, the image signal processor. It handles a wide variety of things such a demosaicing (how does that work?), it handles a lot of the automatic features we take for granted (auto white balance, auto focus, and so on, how do those work?), it applies corrections for things such as lens imperfections (things such as vingetting). It is responsible for the encoding as well, if you want it to be a JPEG, or a RAW file like DNG. How do those file formats work? What are their strengths and weaknesses?

 

But we are still not done. All of these things are controlled by firmwares and functions in the OS. How do those work? They were written in some language like C, so we should learn about that. But the components don't know how to interpret C, so we also need to understand what a compiler is and how that works. When we are done with that we will be down to machine language. Better learn assembly too! But we are still not done, because we will have to learn how the hardware interprets all the assembly commands. Now that we are down at this low level we should also look into how the actual hardware works. How does transistors work, how do all the logical gates work and how do they end up making different functions possible?

 

 

Not even all the things I listed would be enough to fully understand how the camera in the iPhone works perfectly. There are a ton of small details you need to understand too. According to Apple they had 800 people working on the camera alone. It is made up of over 200 individual parts. I don't think any one of those 800 people fully understand every aspect of the camera. It is so complex that you need an entire team that are specialized in different areas to develop it.

 

I have only talked about the camera mind you. It is just one out of many modules that makes up an iPhone. Things like the SoC is a MUCH bigger subject which would require even more research to fully understand.

ok i get it, its quite hard.. but isnt there something between super simple - extremely complicated.. why they use the material they use and how the screen works. ive figured out a couple of things about the screen and battery with chemicals and materials but i need a little more about the electronics..

[SmilesRising]

2 minutes ago, Mrhappyjolly said:

it would help if you could tell us why you are asking, are you writing a report on phones or doing research? If you tell us why we'll have some context as to what you are after. 

im doing a little powerpoint of the iphone. ive covered the history, how they make it,conseqeunses and such..

[Mrhappyjolly]

for example. you might want to get this book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/iOS-Hackers-Handbook-Charlie-Miller-ebook/dp/B00888KNL2/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1463911460&sr=8-12&keywords=jailbreaking

 

it was written by the very clever people who released jailbreaks for iphones, it will go into a lot of detail about how the iphone works from a software perspective.