Multi-Core CPU Designed for the iPhone

Imagination Technologies announced a new chips, known as le PowerVR SGX543MP. This chips is dedicated to the mobile phone market, including the iPhone, and features several cores. It is not exactly a multi-core chips as we know them for multi-core CPU, but rather a chips integrated a CPU and several dedicated and specific pipelines or units to treat/manage/encode/decode data depending on the needs, providing the required power when it is needed, while running on an economic mode when the work load is low.

Developers will not have to think about the number of cores when they code for such chips. the hardware will define depending on the work load if it is required to activate those specific pipelines while optimizing their usage. So depending on the request, the CPU can use from 1 to 16 computing units.

The company is already the one selected by Apple to develop the current chips powering the iPhone, and they announced that this new chip could run a Snow Leopard derived version in a future iPhone OS, making GPGPU available in the iPhone. As a proof, this chips is compatible with Open CL.