Four Core iPhone on Apple’s Horizon

By Aaron Besson at 9 January, 2009, 1:36 pm

There is allot of buzz going around at CES 2009 about Imagination Technologies announcement of a new PowerVR SGX543 chip that is the firm’s first multi-core capable GPU. This new GPU, in theory, can scale to an unlimited number of cores and offer support for GPGPU acceleration. This is all especially interesting since Apple could have access to the PowerVR SGX543 and may be planning a powerful graphics engine with GPGPU acceleration for one of the next iPhones. Last year Apple licensed Imagination’s GPU technology blueprints and even invested in the company.

Here is a littler more about the new PowerVR SGX543 from TG Daily:

“Imagination did not reveal many details about its new design, the PowerVR SGX543 (5 for series, 4 for performance and 3 to indicate that it is part of the Power VR Extended product line), in terms of numbers since clock speed, resulting performance or power consumption largely depend on the specs a hardware designer chooses. But we were told that the shader performance has been increased by about 40% and that the GPU delivers about 2.5x the image processing performance of an ARM Cortex-8 CPU and outperforms the a 600 MHz ARM chip in some traditional CPU benchmarks with a 100 MHz design. Power consumption is also down, but company representatives indicated that “a huge leap has not been made.

The new 543 isn’t about power consumption; it is about performance and features. It is multi-core capable - 543 chips can run in parallel - with power consumption and space constraints being the main limitations for the number of cores - and can translate into very capable hardware for devices such as netbooks, MIDs, set top boxes and mobile phones. According to Imagination, one core delivers a performance of 35 million polygons per second and a fill rate of 1 Gigapixel per second at 200 MHz.”

All this new processing power means that Apple’s next gen iPhone’s, iPod Touch and maybe even some sort of Netbook/Touch Tablet could see and iPhone OS more similar to what you would find on your Mac. GPGPU acceleration will allow these portable devices to print, scan, fax, video, video chat, multi tasking (apps running in the background) and will also allow developers to create new Business and Social Apps that utilize the increased capabilites/processing power of the device. Sometime in the not so distant future, the next iPhone could become a much more capable business device, supporting features normally only capable on a computer or notebook.

This will also make the iPhone (and the iPod Touch or any future Touch Tablet/Netbook) a much more powerful gaming platform than the current offerings from Nintendo and Sony. The current iPhone and it’s slightly faster brethren the iPod Touch, are both already on par with the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, with the substantial increase horsepower to a four core GPU with GPGPU acceleration, the iPhone will certianly blow past its competition.

Rumors are that the new Four Core iPhone will require a completely updated iPhone OS version 3.0. When Apple introduced the iPhone 3G, they released iPhone OS version 2.0 to support the new GPS chip and 3G capabilities. It would be only logical that a new firmware would be released to support any new hardware and improved operating system. But is 3.0 too soon for such a leap in hardware?

The time it usually takes these chips to make it into consumable devices is usually over a year so it is more than likely that the new iPhone Four Core will be released with iPhone OS 4.0. Apple may choose to instead use one of the current offereings from the PowerVR SGX line of GPU’s from Imagination Technologies.

No matter what, the Apple iPhone as a Phone and a Personal/Business/Social/Media/Gaming device has a great future ahead. As hardware performance increases and power consumption comes down and these processors, GPU’s, memory and other components get smaller, we will only see better and better iPhone’s.

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