Apple iPhone 5 To Sport New A8 Processor With Dual-Core Graphics Architecture

Apple is reportedly going to add a new ARM Cortex A8 processor to its iPhone 5.

Apple Daily, ,a Hong Kong based newspaper, reported that Apple's iPhone 5 will be powered by a dual core processor with SGX543 graphics. It is reported that Apple is in contact with a Taiwanese component maker for the A8 SoC. Currently Apple uses a custom made A4 SoC in its iPad and iPhone 4 and uses SGX535 graphics and video support.

The report of Apple's chip boost follows the recent slew of smartphones that were released at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Most of the phones, such as the Motorola Atrixare running on dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processors. Also Motorola's Xoom tablet uses the same processor, ushering in features such as 1080p video playback capability which the iPhone and iPad currently lack.

Imagination Technologies' SGX543 architecture was released in Jan. 2009 at CES. The chip design delivers real-world performance of 35 million polygons per second and 1 Gigapixel -- 1 billion pixels -- per second fill rate at 200 MHz, making it capable of driving HD screens with smooth high definition 3D graphics.

Including this architecture in Apple devices will allow the iPhone to offer 1080p video playback and HDMI support.