Whenever Apple posts a beta of of software that they’re working on, they usually try their best to scrub any clues as to products that are yet to be released. They don’t always succeed though in hiding things such as evidence that there’s a successor to products already out on the market. That being said, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Apple’s working on what will eventually be called the iPhone 5, and iPad 3. This latest software beta however, for iOS 5.1, is different. In it there’s code that confirms Apple is working on a quad core processor. Will said processor end up inside the iPad 3 that’s rumored to be announced during March? Maybe. What about the next generation iPhone? That’s a tough call, but if we look back at how Apple’s typically done things, meaning how they’ve made every new iPhone faster than the previous model, then the answer is yes.
So what’s going to be inside this new quad core chip and what’s it going to be called? The name should be easy to figure out considering the first iPad had the A4, the next iPad had the A5, so surely the next generation will have the A6. As for what’s going to make the A6 chip special, there are mixed opinions within the office. Is Apple going to go all out and make each of those cores ARM’s next generation Cortex A15 or will Apple do what NVIDIA did with the Tegra 3 and make each core an ARM Cortex A9? Remember that the ARM Cortex A9 is currently being used in a dual core configuration in the Apple A5.
As for the graphics processor, assuming that the iPad 3 has a retina display with a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels, that’s quadruple the number of pixels in the current generation iPad 2, so at minimum the A6 would have to have a GPU that can push out quadruple the number of pixels. If Apple simply doubled the amount of GPU cores in the A5 from 2 to 4, that wouldn’t be enough. So will the A6 use PowerVR’s newest Series 6 GPU?
So many unanswered questions!