All Articles in chipset
Venture Beat claims a “very trusted” source has informed them that Apple’s PA Semi team might not have been behind the new iPad’s Apple A4 chipset:
PA Semi didn’t do the A4. It was the existing VLSI team. Apple has made custom chips for years like the Northbridges for G4 and G5.
This [...]
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According to Bright Side of the News, it turns out that newly spun Apple A4 system-on-a-chip that debuted alongside the iPad does indeed pack more punch than the Sammy in the iPhone 3GS:
A4 is a System-on-a-Chip, or SOC, that integrates the main processor [ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore i.e. Multi-Processing Core, identical to ones used [...]
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During ARM’s Q3 financial results announced today, 9to5Mac noticed this little gem:
including a license for ARM’s 2GHz implementation of a dual core Cortex-A9 processor.
We’ve heard about the Cortex A9 before. Purportedly, is 5x faster than an intel Atom, yet uses the same amount of power in a 60% smaller package.
Could this be [...]
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Apple Insider reports that Samsung has a 45 nanometer, 1GHz ARM processor, code-named “Hummingbird” on the horizon.
It uses the same Cortex A8 architecture as the current iPhone 3GS (which runs at a clocked-down 600MHz) but due to the smaller size, is said to not consumer any more power or generate any more heat than the [...]
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Following up on rumors of a $800 Apple netbook, MacBook, iTablet, etc. VentureBeat reports that Apple might also use the new platform to introduce their long-rumored custom system-on-a-chip.
This would be the result of Apple purchasing fabless chip design firm Palo Alto Semiconductor (PA Semi) and hiring Papermaster from IBM and graphics processor (GPU) gurus x2 [...]
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MacRumors is reporting that Apple’s new iPhone 3GS, while indeed using Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR graphics core, may just have a little more under the hood than previously thought:
iPhone developers, however, have discovered that the iPhone 3GS has extension files named “IMGSGX535GLDriver” suggesting that the new iPhone uses the more powerful graphics processor intended [...]
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CNET has an interesting post up detailing what we can expect in the next generation ARM processor. Just yesterday we took a look at the iPhone 3G’s ARM 11 vs. the new iPhone 3G S’ Cortex ARM8 and the difference was impressive — most impressive. Well, next year is promising a dual-core ARM Cortex A9…!
Icebike [...]
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Anandtech gives their usual in-depth look at the processors inside Apple’s new iPhone 3G S. First the CPU, the new ARM Cortex A8 and the short of it is — if the iPhone 2G and 3G were old 486 PCs, the iPhone 3G S would be a Pentium:
As for the GPU, the PowerVR SGX — [...]
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T-Mobile Netherlands (via Wired) has let slip the formerly elusive specs for the iPhone 3G S:
256MB of RAM
600Mhz CPU
Anandtech (via Macrumors) gives further info:
Although unannounced, the iPhone 3GS uses (again) a Samsung SoC but this time instead of the ARM11 + MBX-Lite combo it’s got a Cortex A8 and PowerVR SGX; just [...]
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Apple Insider reveals that:
Sources have now reported that Apple has detailed that Imagination’s PowerVR SGX is indeed the graphics processor used in the iPhone 3G S, and that it is “designed for OpenGL ES 2.0.” The new 2.0 specification of OpenGL for Embedded Systems eliminates most of the fixed-function rendering pipeline for a [...]
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