iPhone 3GS, Cortex A8 and the PowerVR SGX

Just a quick note about the new iPhone 3GS. Recently Noel Llopis tweeted about an AnandTech article, which contains more detailed info about the iPhone 3GS and its hardware (see page 2 for the juicy details).

It’s not clear if the information comes from a tear-down, but it matches a lot of other information out there in the wild. So while this hasn’t been confirmed, I’m happy to assume that the info is good.

The Cortex A8 is an ARMv7 chip, where the chip in the existing iPhones is an ARMv6. The PowerVR MBX, gets replaced by a PowerVR SGX with programmable shaders.

These specs represent a big leap in performance compared with the previous generations; NEON represents improvements for SIMD operations, in terms of speed and usage, and OpenGLES 2.0 will give improved graphical performance and fidelity: Sony needs to come up with a PSP2 soon, as this new iPhone has some serious oomph.