Apple to go Dual-Core GPU in iPad 2 and iPhone 5?
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| So what, exactly, could be powering the iPad 2's alleged 2048-by-1536 resolution Retina Display? At the heart of the new device—as well, the iPhone 5—allegedly sits the A5 chip, Apple's upgrade and successor to the A4, which currently powers the iPad, the iPhone 4,Coach Outlet Online the Apple TV, and the fourth-generation iPod Touch.
The A5 itself is a system-on-a-chip that's rumored to consist of two different parts: a multicore ARM Cortex-A9 processor, rumored to be a technical requirement for Google's "Honeycomb" version of its Android operating system, paired with an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX543MP2 graphics and video core.
We've covered the SGX543 a bit in our previous reporting about the iPad 2's potential switch up to a display that's quadruple the pixel count of its predecessor. Air Yeezy The speedier graphics processor—allegedly double the power of the SGX535 that powers Apple's A4-based devices—would benefit both graphics processing for apps and games as well as video processing for the iPad 2's rumored FaceTime video chatting capabilities and video playback. The GPU might even give Apple the pocessing power to offer HDMI output on its A5-based devices, should it choose to build that into the design of the iPad 2 or iPhone 5.
But, in the famous words of CEO Steve Jobs, there is, "one more thing."
Internal sources have told AppleInsider that Apple isn't just going to stuff a single SGX543 core within its A5 design. The company is pursuing a multi-core GPU—specifically, the aforementioned SGX543MP2, which smashes two SGX543 cores together into a single processing unit. That could give a device like the iPhone 5 or the iPad 2 four times the performance of the iPhone 4 or iPad. And in the case of the latter, it lends a lot more weight, hardware-wise, to the speculation that the iPad's display resolution is getting kicked up a significant degree.
Since the new SGX543 GPUs support OpenCL, that would allow a device's central processor to offload tasks to the GPU as necessary. That means faster graphics and general processing thanks to the workhorse efforts of a single chip. Gucci Outlet Online And developers won't have to rewrite a single line of code to ensure that their games and apps benefit from the multicore GPU—the SGX543 processes its parallelism at the hardware level, independent of any input from running software.
According to AppleInsider, Sony's PlayStation Portable 2 is rumored to use a similar, multi-GPU architecture based on SGX543 chips. Only, in Sony's case, the handset will use even more graphics cores than the rumored iPad 2 or iPhone 5. |
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