Poor 4g battery life is not a core property of the technology. The radios in cur...

megablast · on March 18, 2012

I can't imagine that it is the CPU, more likely the radio required for 4G.

nerdtalker · on March 18, 2012

I see this misconception propagated a lot - that process node only affects the AP's power draw in the main SoC.

This is a fallacy simply because the baseband is itself another SoC. Take the MDM6x00 family inside the iPhone 4 CDMA and iPhone 4S. Inside is an ARM1136 at up to 512 MHz, and two QDSP4000s at ~150 MHz for modem. It is an SoC itself, but for cellular, and thus moving from one process node to another will change power draw.

The fatter traces in some of the ASIC in the transceiver and the PAs after that front end is one thing, the power hungry baseband is another.