“The iPhone and iPhone 3G use a system on a chip (SoC) from Samsung. The SoC is a custom part and actually has Apple’s logo on the chip. The SoC houses the CPU, GPU and memory for the iPhone,” Anand Lal Shimpi reports for AnandTech.
“The CPU [in the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G] is based on the ARM11 core, in specific it is the ARM1176JZF-S. The CPU runs at 412MHz to save power, although the core is capable of running at 667MHz,” Lal Shimpi reports.
“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,” Lal Shimpi reports. “If the ARM11 is like a modern day 486 with a very high clock speed, the Cortex A8 is like a modern day Pentium. The A8 lengthens the integer pipeline to 13 stages, enabling its 600MHz clock speed (what I’m hearing the 3GS runs at). The Cortex A8 also widens the processor; the chip is now a two-issue in-order core, capable of fetching, decoding and executing two RISC instructions in parallel.”
“The iPhone 3GS’ performance upgrades should make the phone feel a lot faster, but the real improvement will be what it enables application and game developers to do. Apple recently hired two former AMD/ATI CTOs, presumably to work on some very graphics-centric projects. The iPhone 3GS may be a mild upgrade from a consumer perspective, but what it’s going to enable is far from it; watch out Nintendo,” Lal Shimpi reports. “Remember the performance gains we saw in the early days of 3D graphics on the PC? We’re about to go through all of that once more in the mobile space. Awesome.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Spark” for the heads up.]
