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Looking beyond WWDC to the future evolution of Apple [AAPL] and its iDevices, the A5 chip is faster than anything offered by the competition, according to Microprocessor Review — but future development may put its smartphones and tablets on different paths. Intel wants a piece of Apple’s growing mobile processor pie — will a hybrid ARM/Intel MacBook follow?“The A5 is Apple’s first processor that jumps ahead of the competition, but this differentiation comes at a high cost. Apple’s processor-design choices will affect the way it rolls out new products in 2011 and beyond,” writes, Linley Gwennap, senior editor for Microprocessor Review.
Gwennap anticipates Apple may have to think different in future. That’s because Apple should match industry trends in order to create a quad-core A6 processor next year, but this may be too hot to run inside an iPhone. The analyst takes this information to suggest Apple may field an A6 inside the iPad 3, and a new version earlier processor inside the iPhone.
Perhaps this is another contributing factor to Apple’s seemingly delayed introduction of the next-generation iPhone? Perhaps the scenario is one in which the iPhone 4S uses an upgraded A4 processor while an A5-powered iPhone becomes scheduled for 2012, when an A6 iPad 3 also appears. This would significantly diversify the product range.Already, when it comes to mobile performance, the A5 is a tiger — faster for 3D performance than Nvidia’s flagship Tegra 2. This is because it carries a 31-square-millimeter graphics processing unit — that GPU alone is as large as the entire surface area of the Tegra 2. What’s the secret? There’s also a touch of mystery about Apple’s A5 design: 33 square millimeters of the chip is extra circuitry that can’t be accounted for. We don’t know what it does: it isn’t for the processor, it isn’t for the graphics processor, audio, Wi-Fi — but at that size (bigger than a Tegra 2 chip) it has to be busy doing something.
Processor manufacturing is currently conducted by Samsung. But, with Apple and Samsung’s mobile division involved in an increasingly bitter courtroom dispute, it seems unlikely this relationship will continue forever. This must be why Apple is working with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to bring that firm online as processor maker.
There’s another option too, and highly-placed executives at that firm seem willing to dance with Apple. Apple “helps shape” Intel�... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]