UPDATED: 4th Gen iPhone HD to Launch June 22, have Apple chipset, 960×640 display, front-facing camera, multitasking

Daring Fireball often blurs the line between carefully concealed wink-nudge leak and flat out facetious commentary, so with that in mind John Gruber has this to say about the 4th generation iPhone (which still won’t be called iPhone 4G!):

Apple A4-family system-on-a-chip. Nothing on whether that would be the ARM Cortex A9 multicore CPU with brand new PowerVR SGX GPU we’ve been drooling over, however. 960×480 display. That would be bigger than even the bigger DROID Google Android phone, but fit perfectly ..read more

iPad A4 Chipset Uses PowerVR SGX Graphics Core

The iPhone 3.2 SDK for iPad has officially outed the PowerVR SGX as the graphics core inside Apple’s A4 chipset:

Using OpenGL ES on iPad is identical to using OpenGL ES on other iPhone OS devices. An iPad is a PowerVR SGX device and supports the same basic capabilities as other SGX devices. However, because the processor, memory architecture, and screen dimensions are different for iPad, you should always test your code on an iPad device before shipping to ensure performance ..read more

Apple iPad A4 Chip Designed by PA Semi Team… or Not?

Venture Beat claims a “very trusted” source has informed them that Apple’s PA Semi team might not have been behind the new iPad’s Apple A4 chipset:

PA Semi didn’t do the A4. It was the existing VLSI team. Apple has made custom chips for years like the Northbridges for G4 and G5.

This information was appended to an article that focused on how great, and power-efficient, PA Semi’s chip design really was. So why wouldn’t Apple use them? Gizmodo speculates:

there ..read more

Imagination at CES: POWERVR SGX545 Graphics Core… Could it be the 4th Gen iPhone GPU?

Imagination, which counts Apple as one of its owners, has provided the GPU (graphics processing unit) for every iPhone to date, including the current iPhone 3GS PowerVR SGX, so it’s not unreasonable to assume the latest, greatest PowerVR SGX545 introduced at CES will be in the 4th generation iPhone, likely to be announced in June/July (and the iPod touch to follow):

SGX545 will also deliver OpenGL ES 2.x and OpenGL 3.2 to deliver class leading 3D graphics performance, and will also ..read more