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Quad-core Apple iPhones with GPGPU acceleration and firmware 3.0

Thursday, January 08, 2009 - 09:48 PM EDT

"One of the most interesting rumors I’ve been tracking here at Macworld Expo in San Francisco surrounds the mysterious four-core iPhone. While the current iPhone has (roughly) the processing power of the Sony PSP, an upgraded four core iPhone would slaughter pretty much every portable gaming platform on the market. The other part of the story is firmware 3.0, which is said to be required on the iPhone 'quad,'" Jason D. O'Grady blogs for ZDNet.

Full article here.

Wolfgang Gruener reports for TG Daily, "Imagination Technologies will announce a new version of its graphics chip IP tomorrow. The PowerVR SGX543 is the firm’s first multi-core capable GPU technology which scales to, in theory, an unlimited number of cores and offer support for GPGPU acceleration. While Imagination’s technology is known to be integrated in graphics products from Intel and Texas Instruments in the past, this new version is especially interesting since Apple could have access to it and may be planning a powerful graphics engine with GPGPU acceleration for one of the next iPhones. Conceivably, the next iPhone could become a much more capable gaming platform than the Nintendo DS or PSP."

"There has been quite some speculation about Apple’s future processor and chipset plans for upcoming iPhone generations, especially since we know that Apple has licensed Imagination’s GPU technology blueprints and even invested in the company," Gruener reports.

"The hardware will enable the company to create entirely new applications as well as features you are used to from your PC, but are not available on your cellphone," Gruener reports. "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."

Gruener reports, "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."

Gruener reports, "The next iPhone may not get this chip, but rely on the current SGX version (which is a significant step up from the MBX chip.) But two generations out, the 543 could be a stunning platform and the iPhone may run applications you can only run on your PC today."

Much more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "James W." for the heads up.]