In an interview with Brooke Crothers, ARM revealed that smartphones will start shipping with the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor in 2010. The Palm Pre was the first smartphone to ship with the ARM Cortex-A8 single core processor last week. As we all know, the Palm Pre supply is currently heavily limited, which is likely due to its next-gen hardware. In other words, we don't expect to see a flood of multi-core based smartphone models in 2010.
Texas Instrument will be a key provider of ARM's Cortex-A9 technology, and its upcoming OMAP 4 processor will boast graphics that support 1080p video and high-definition record and playback, larger screen resolutions, and DSLR-like performance with up to 20-megapixel camera support. When announced back in February, TI said that the OMAP 4 platform and development tools are expected to sample in the second half of 2009, with production expected by the second half of 2010.
That said, if you've heard of a phone called the iPhone, you might get a taste of the future graphics capabilities already this year. According to recent rumors, the phone will ship with Imagination's PowerVR SGX GPU, though it might not be the more powerful version that'll be part of next year's TI OMAP 4. Check out Appleinsider's story about the GPU found in the new iPhone here.
As always, Apple is doing whatever it can to prevent stuff like this to leak out, but we think Apple's performance claims at the keynote we attended earlier this week adds up to the fact that the iPhone 3GS is onto something truly great hardware-wise. And we obviously hope to see the multi-core processor in next year's iPhone, though it might be too soon.
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