Apple launched the third generation iPhone about a week ago and now that the first samples are starting to ship we hear the first rumors of the fourth generation. Apple brags about the performance of its new iPhone 3G S with the single-core ARM Cortex-A8 processor, but it’s nothing compared to the next one. ARM is working on a dual-core processor architecture called Cortex-A9, that will later scale up to four cores, which launches in 2010. A processor that is expected to appear in phones around the same time.
It hardly comes as a surprise that Apple is one of the companies that is expected to use ARM’s new mobile processor and with fresh 45nm technology it is not just the performance that is considerably better, but also power efficiency will improve over the current architecture.
With a more aggressive out-of-order architecture Cortex-A9 will raise the performance bar several notches up, even if we neglect the extra core(s).
As usual there is always something faster waiting around the corner so those who were waiting for Apple iPhone 3G S now knows what to expect in a year or so.
