There is an article by ZDNet which talks about one of the many rumors at Macworld Expo. That rumor being the future iPhone may have 4 cores instead of a single core. This rumor is based around Apples investment in Imagination Technologies and its licensing of the companies GPU designs.
Imagination Technologies will be annoucing its PowerVR SGX543 at CES tomorrow, heres some information about the GPU which Apple may or may not use.
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.
While Imagination declined to comment on speculation whether this may be hardware Apple is currently working with, it seems to be a conclusive thought that the chip may end up in a future iPhone or iPod. The iPhone 3G uses a “light” PowerVR MBX design, the predecessor of the current PowerVR SGX, and represents the least capable graphics engine Imagination offers for licensing at this time. The 543 could lift the iPhone into a whole new gaming category, but graphics capability may not be the most interesting feature of this chip: It supports GPGPU acceleration via OpenCL as well.
This is all fine and dandy, howevr the power consumption will be a really big issue and therefore I think Apple may or may not use it in the iPhone. But its also possible that they may use it in other devices.