If there was one standout device at Qualcomm’s Summit this year it was the Asus ROG9 phone. SemiAccurate wasn’t impressed until we heard (some of) the details.
Note: Qualcomm wants us to point out that they sponsored SemiAccurate to come to the 2024 Summit. Like any other event sponsorship, it will not affect our coverage good or bad.
Lets get this out of the way up front, Asus has not launched the ROG9 phone yet and the details, basically all the specs, are still not public. That said it uses the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite CPU with the second gen Nuvia core. It is a solid chip, well beyond solid, and this time it isn’t hobbled by a broken platform and non-existent software enablement. This is the long way of saying we expect good things from the CPU in Asus and non-Asus forms.
It started off like the rest
Looking at the device it doesn’t seem like much because it uses the same chassis as the last, current for a few more weeks, phone. There is the camera bumpout, a second mini-screen on the back, and a couple of buttons. Not exactly exciting stuff, just a phone with likely high end specs and almost all features enabled. This is exactly what you want in a gaming phone.
The interesting bits started when Asus’s Sascha Krohn brought out a disassembled ROG9 device in order to to show off the engineering. This is something SemiAccurate has been pushing device makers to do for a long time. Phones tend to look like black rectangles and from the outside the differentiators are mainly minutia about how the corners are rounded and beveled. The real cool stuff is under the hood. You can occasionally see some of this from an exploded device under glass but when someone with intimate knowledge of the device explains the details, then it comes to life. Asus was the first to do this in a long time.
Back removed on the ROG9 phone
So what is interesting about the ROG9 when the covers are lifted? Lets start out with the obvious bits, the batteries and USB ports. You will quickly come to the conclusion that there are two of each, quite the unusual feature set. Both have good reason to be there though, something we wouldn’t have understood from a static model.
Starting with the easy bit, the dual USB ports. Almost every phone in the last decade has had their USB/charging port on the bottom which is both obvious and functional. If you are gaming, recall the ROG9 is a gaming phone, you are probably holding the device in landscape mode. That USB cable that you probably have it plugged in to is now an annoyance to one hand or the other. Asus put the second port on middle of the side opposite the buttons, usually the bottom of the device in landscape mode.
If you look at the picture above, you can see the cutout for the USB port to the right of the CPU. The board is upside down and flipped left to right for this shot so you can see the CPU, assembled properly the cutout should be on the left. You can now charge the phone while gaming without that damn USB cord getting in the way. If you are using it as a phone, put the cable in the other port. Genius. OK, maybe not genius but very smart engineering that will make your life better. You can see the cable for the main USB port on the bottom but the port itself is absent for these pictures.
The two batteries are another interesting idea. The obvious reasons are that you can charge one while the other is being used, and that is indeed the case. You can do this just as well with a single physical battery with the correct internal partitioning of the cells though, and it would probably be cheaper and have more capacity for a given volume due to the lessened case/external area. So why two if it is such a lose lose?
Balance if the first reason. If you have one big battery it will push the CPU board to the side and make one end heavier. This doesn’t matter until you have been gaming on it for a few hours, then you more than notice. Very smart but it gets better.
You may also have noticed that the CPU/motherboard is in the middle of the device. Other than putting the second USB port in an optimal place, what does this buy you? Well the CPU generates most of the heat in the phone and now it is centrally placed. The hottest spot is in the area where your hands are least likely to be when gaming. Again over long periods of time, hot spots can get annoying even if they are well below the tolerance threshold. It also aids cooling because you don’t have this big insulating bit of water filled protein matrices covering your best dissipation point. So dual batteries has another knock-on effect, two actually. Very smart engineering.
The back of the motherboard itself
If you look at the back of that board you will see something interesting, a bit of copper slug peeking through the heat sink. Asus put a direct contact copper slug to pull heat off the back of the CPU, more on the front in a bit. The big silver heat dissipating slug on top of that then has liquid metal injected between the two metal layers to maximize contact and heat transfer. It is a long way to go but unless they really screwed things up, it should be a very efficient cooling solution. For the record I HIGHLY doubt they screwed it up but we don’t have one to play with so I won’t say that with 100% confidence.
Vapor chambers between the screen and CPU
Back to the cooling we have a fairly large vapor chamber just under the screen, a very common feature in modern phones. There are a bunch of thermal pads to ensure correct contact between the CPU and the vapor chamber, again pretty standard. The thermal paste is obviously absent from this disassembled demo model and there is a large carbon fiber thermal sheet you can’t see under it all. There is also a large carbon sheet on the back side of the phone as well but it wasn’t present for the pics. Asus seems to take cooling seriously for the ROG9, no surprise there.
Other bits in the picture that might be useful are the two USB port holes. Above the www watermark is the cutout for the main USB port, the side port is between the two mounting screws on the bottom. Not visible is the thin film LED panel for the back display or the speakers which take most of the blank area outboard of the batteries. The camera module is also missing as was the back panel itself but we suspect that is more to hide some sensor specs until the embargo lifts.
As a side note one of the highlights of the presentations was Asus’s Sascha Krohn’s talk which you won’t see in the replay. Why? When he came out the slides and teleprompter were for someone else’s talk. Panic set in because, well, it was warranted. Normally a person in this situation falls over, curls up into a fetal position, then crawls off stage whimpering. Not Sascha, he ran with it. He pointed out that the slides were not his and then said something to the effect of, “I’ll just go with them”. Laughter and applause broke out, genuine not PR prompted.
After a few minutes, a couple of slides, and some more laughs, the correct presentation was found and off Sascha went. The presentation itself was pretty routine, a few laughs and the normal product introduction for the ROG9 phone, no glitches from that point on. When Sascha left the stage however, the applause was quite real and possibly louder than for anyone else, the audience knew exactly how impressive that save was. Why does Asus keep this guy hidden again?
In the end the Asus ROG9 phone, at least what we know of it, looks pretty impressive. It is a fully kitted out Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite with the second gen Nuvia core. Throw in a lot of unique features like the second USB port and dual batteries and it gets really interesting. The best parts however are the things that you will probably never notice, the battery split for balance rather than charging and the center placed heat source.
We aren’t going to say that you should run out and buy a ROG9 phone until we can get our hands on one and see if reality matches the spec sheet. While not stated numerically, many people at the Summit said the numbers would basically be best in class or close there to for everything. With Asus’s quality of late, occasional hiccups aside, we are cautiously optimistic about this phone. If the price is right, I might just buy one.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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