Last week, Qualcomm talked about their new S4 Snapdragon processor, which bundled in LTE, NFC, and multi-core clock speeds between 1.5 and 2.5 GHz. Most notably, the S4 processor is on a 28 nm chip, which is more or less unheard of in the space, and translates to 25% – 40% energy savings from the new archietecture, and another 20% – 30% from the cellular modem. That’s efficient enough that an adorable circus of beetles, cockroaches, a scorpion, a tarantula, and a praying mantis can charge a phone with an S5 processor inside, apparently. Qualcomm figures it would take 11.5 praying mantises pedaling away on teeny little unicycles for an hour to get a phone running for 1 minute.
Here’s a video showing Qualcomm’s bug circus in action. I think it’s pretty awesome, but wouldn’t recommend it for the squeamish.
