A mobile phone chip maker has taken a metaphor a bit too literally in order to prove its processors run cooler than its competitors.
Responding to complaints that its competitors' phones were "hot enough to melt butter", Qualcomm staged an 'experiment' to prove that its new Snapdragon S4 chips did not.
That's right - it placed three phones face down with a piece of plastic on top, ran a bunch of heavy-duty programs ('benchmarks') and watched as the butter melted. Or didn't in the S4's case.
Now. Obviously, as tends to happen in demonstrations of this kind, the experiment showed Qualcomm's chip to be 'better' than its rivals. And we're a little suspicious that said competitors weren't named in the clip.
As such we would hesitate to take that as 'proof' of anything.
In fact usually we would't indulge Qualcomm by publishing the video... But there's just something unusually appealing about watching butter melt on top of a phone. So we did.
The S4 is optimised in several ways to boost thermal efficiency, the company says.
It claims better coping with heat will improve performance when doing intensive tasks like video editing and shooting photos.
Among the applications for the S4 chips, some are heading for Windows Phone 8 while others are apparently going to turn up in laptops.
Just don't try the butter thing at home unless you really like the smell of French cooking. Or really hate your phone.