The most powerful gaming smartphone, or is it the smallest pc

[mnags22]

Hi LTT community,

     This question has been bothering me for a while. With recent improvements from the gaming smartphone market such as the Red Magic phone, the Black-Shark phone, an the ROG phone came ideas. My idea is the smallest pc ever. But at the same time it would be the best gaming smartphone. First here is some background. I was on a budget when I was building my pc and I went for a Ryzen 5 2400g. I was amazed by the power in that tiny device. I also had to buy some value select ram from corsair. I was once again amazed by the actual size of the ram modules. relatively they were tiny. I was just thinking that you could possible make a really small pc/ phone. De-lidded the APU is very small, and thin. I just need your guys input on wether this might work. If you made a simplified motherboard without a pcie slot, and without any IO, Other than a thunderbolt port. then you could put in a de-lidded APU, about 10 ram modules, and a 4000 Milliamp hour battery. then for cooling you could add a cooling design similar to the ROG phone and the Note 9. I was thinking that this could be in a phone ,tablet somewhere in the size range of an iPad mini and a Note 9. these are all just ideas and I think that they would be awesome if they were put into reality. Just add your thoughts below. 

[Fasauceome]

Only thing is that the case is the heat sink, and I would not want to touch the heat sink of something cranking along at 80 degrees celsius

[mnags22]

yeah that is the main issue i'm trying to think around

[Theguywhobea]

Yeah the whole issue is heat, the Note 9 has the Snapdragon 845 which consumes around 5Ws (https://www.anandtech.com/show/12420/snapdragon-845-performance-preview/4) and just for comparisons sake we'll say that it also on average needs to dissipate 5W's of heat.

 

Where the 2400G has a TDP of 65w meaning the heatsink needs to be capable of dissipating 65w's of heat. This is the real limiting factor as to why things can't get much smaller while keeping the same TDP, at least not with current materiel's that we use for heat dissipation.

 

This is all not to mention that Qualcomm and other these other mainstream ARM CPU manufacturers have dumped tons of money and time into making sure these CPU's all run at the lowest power state they can possibly be at since most phone's cooling systems can't handle sustained loads, and although mainstream desktop and laptop CPU's are catching up I would be willing to bet they are still far worse off than these ARM CPU's.

[TheRandomness]

I mean, have fun:
Delidding a soldered CPU.
Fitting such a giant package into a small device. The reason phone/tablet PCBs are so small is because the SoC/RAM are all lumped into one package, stacked atop each other.

Also, it'd run Windows, right? Considering (afaik) all mobile OSs are ARM.

When it comes to heatsinks... Well, that's a problem you'd never get to, considering that this is basically impossible.

Oh, and! The power source? How are you going to feed a ~65W TDP chip (in reality consumes 60+-20W)? You'd need a hell of a lot of batteries.

[Mooshi]

Smartphones are a terrible gaming platform. Nintendo wins in mobile gaming, phone gaming is mostly ad ridden junk.

[Damascus]

29 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

Delidding a soldered CPU.

The APU's aren't soldered.  IMO the biggest cost here is the motherboard, a custom PCB in the style OP wants would probably run an individual with no connections 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars

[.Ocean]

If you think about it, isnt this just something like the Nintendo switch? Linus has also done some videos on that very small windows laptop which (as he demonstrated) will fit in a pocket. Large corporations are working there best on squeezing the highest performance into a small package so I would consider what the market has produced at the moment the best of the best. I would look to those as examples and see if they can improve in any way.