Gadget Porn: Chipworks takes apart the Exynos 5 powered Samsung Galaxy S4

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 26 Apr 2013

Geeks usually become geeks at an early age, and they typically start by taking a screwdriver to the gadgets mom and dad have laying around the house. That desire to take things apart continues into adulthood, and luckily, there are people who are paid large sums of money to work in a field called “Competitive Analysis”. These people buy the latest and greatest consumer electronics equipment, meticulously document everything about their internals, and then sell that data to companies who want to know how their competitors do what they do.

With that background out of the way, here’s a link to the Chipworks teardown of Samsung’s Galaxy S4. Note that they managed to secure the Exynos 5 Octa powered variant, which is different from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 model that’s being sold most everywhere else.

What did these guys find inside the GS4? The camera module is made by Sony. Wolfson provides the audio. Broadcom makes the NFC work. And Samsung does pretty much the rest. The processor, the DRAM, the storage, the power management, and a whole bunch more. Intel provides the cellular connectivity, though the model tested appears to lack 4G LTE support.