When manufacturers mention the speeds of smartphone processors, is it right in my understanding that the speeds between smartphone processors and desktop processors are comparable?
In other words, can I hypothetically swap the Snapdragon Krait 1.5 GHz quad-core processor with my 1.2 GHz Celeron desktop processor and expect faster responses?
Lets start with the obvious things and work our way down.
Physically different form factors of systems have different ways of interfacing with your motherboard - you can't get a desktop LGA or PGA processor into a smaller laptop socket with a different pinout. Phones and some laptops also use soldered on BGA processors. You'd be trying to fit a 1/4 inch peg into a 1/2 inch hole.
You'd also need 'motherboard' level support - with PCs this would be in the bios/uefi firmware to be able to bootstrap the processor. Intel's sandy bridge and ivy bridge processors shared a socket, and could be swapped between boards of either generation, but sandy bridge boards needed a firmware update. As such your firmware would need to be able to communicate with either.
Secondly, they run different Instruction Set Architectures . Assuming you had a magical motherboard with a chipset that could speak to both a specific ARM and Intel chip... none of your software would work without a compatibility layer. You could in theory outfit an OS to run software from another architecture, like rosetta, but simply swapping chips would result in breakage in software. And this is assuming a hypothetical magical system, that is compatible with two completely different chip designs!
In short, if you had two chips with ISA compatibility, identical pin outs and firmware support, you could swap them. If you tried to put an arm chip into a intel board, or a intel processor into a arm phone (which would be monumentally stupid considering phones have soldered on processors), things would very likely not work. Things might burn out since pinouts are different. It simply would be a disaster.
Finally, clock speeds of processors these days has less and less relevance to actual performance. There was a massive dip in processor clock speed post pentium IV on intel processors. Comparing clock speeds is useful within the same family and generation of processors taking into account cache and core count. Comparing an arm processor and a intel processor of identical speeds properly would mean throwing carefully designed sets of work at them to see how they perform.
In short
One does not simply switch chips between ISAs or formfactors without a full engineering facility.
Edit: As of 2014, AMD's planning a family of systems with pin compatible arm and x86 core options, under the codename 'skybridge'. There's nothing concrete outside press releases, and various articles, but this would be the closest thing to what the OP asked for.
These would be pin compatible processors with chipsets that can handle either arch, and in theory you could stick an appropriate processor of a different architecture, in the right sort of socket, or desolder and solder on a new, different processor.
However, this is exactly what I mean by needing a full engineering facility, and precisely what I would mean by a magical motherboard.
Short answer:
You are asking to compare apples and oranges. It's not a fair comparison.
Long answer:
There are a ton of factors involved other than raw CPU clock speed, mostly hardware related. Peripherals, memory, and bus speed and architecture are biggies. Another is how the CPU silicon is constructed; ARM CPUs are typically simpler, and don't have performance-enhancing features found in x86 chips that boost the power requirements and chip die size.
Generally speaking, the thermal and power requirements of the smartphone will always make it possible for desktop CPUs to be better purely in terms of die size (form factor). The question is how much "better" is needed, and will we reach a plateau point?
The Processors used in mobile phones (cellphones/feature-phones/smartphones) are a different category (they are mostly ARM processors) than PC's and are optimised for even lower power and cooling resources.
Tablets/slates/pads/fondleslabs form a middle ground where traditional desktop/laptop CPU architectures (e.g. x86) and traditional small-device architectures (e.g. ARM) are both used. You can view this as convergence from both directions.
A necessary consequence is that mobile processors are slower but they probably incorporate power-saving tricks that are not so much used in desktop PCs (I think variable CPU clock-rates started in mobile processors).
Processing power is still orders of magnitude higher on even older desktops compared to the most advanced phones on the market. An Intel Atom processor is significantly faster than anything in any smartphone.
The thinking behind building a smartphone processor is something like 95% make it as low power as possible and 5% make it fast(Not real numbers of course). It has to be in a device and powered on the entire time and last a whole day, the power usage has to be tiny. Desktop PC processors are very much performance oriented.
Yes you can.
BUT, with the same cpu specs.. because smartphones uses SoC (System on a Chip) and there is lots of SoC options in the world... you need to find a same cpu pinout and architecture...
example: if want to upgrade an intel atom z2520 1.20 GHz (Asus ZenFone 4) to 2.00 GHz, you need to find a same cpu specs with higher speed. lets say z2580 (Asus ZenFone 5, 2,00GHz). you can swap the cpu ic, because they have a same cpu specs (socket, x86 architecture)
According to Intel Ark, z2520 and z2580 has a same cpu socket (FC-MB4760) thats all i know.. but with ARM, i dont know...
please correct me if i wrong.. and i'm sorry for my bad english..
Yes, speeds for smartphone and desktop processors (as well as any other processors) are comparable in such a way, that 1 Hz equals 1 computational operation per second. In this way - assuming both CPUs have the same or similar instruction set and bus width - a 1.5 GHz quad-core processor can compute faster than a 1.2 GHz Celeron.
Practically you cannot swap the Snapdragon with the Celeron, as the hardware interfaces are incompatible.
