No custom chip for new iPhone
Although Apple has displayed all the signs of developing a custom chipset to run their iPhone, common sense dictates that the new hardware will not come with the new iPhone next week.
When Apple purchased the chip design company PA Semi, a new processor for the iPhone was clearly on the development road map. The road became clearer when it was rumored that Apple had licensed design technology from ARM in Great Britain. Finally, when the Cupertino electronics giant began advertising for NEON extended instruction set engineers for ARM processor development, the actual road to that new processor became crystal clear. It is also clear, however, that the road to that new processor is too long to be covered in a single year.
It is therefore most unlikely that the new iPhone, likely to be introduced next week, will have a custom Apple processor. The design and build process for that custom chipset is likely to take about two years, and certainly cannot have been done in the year since the PA Semi purchase, according to a Forbes story. Therefore the new iPhone, when it debuts, will almost certainly be running on a faster version of the Samsung processor used by the 3G phone.
Knowledgeable industry watchers say that such a custom Apple ARM processor is perhaps nine months away, which is just about right for the 2010 new product cycle of the iPhone. By then, with competition from many sources heating up, Apple will probably need the speed boost to run the applications that are now being developed for iPhone OS 3.0, something they will need to stay ahead of the competition.
The 3G iPhone uses a single-core processor, as do most of today’s smartphones. The Apple ARM processor would certainly be a multi-core design and could well bring the 2010 iPhone into the speed and power range of a mid-range notebook. That would bring us one step closer to being able to carry a real computer in our pockets in less than a year – an astonishing development when you think about it.
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