Samsung makes some great ARM-based smartphone chips… and even fabricate Apple’s in-house-designed A5 CPU, so when Samsung talks about the future of chips, they’re talking in part the future of the iPhone.
And what is that future? According to a Samsung rep, Samsung is “planning to release a 2GHz dual-core CPU-equipped smartphone by next year” that will have “the data processing capacities of a regular PCs.”
That’s a huge leap in the clock speed of the current A5 SoC, which maxes out at 1GHz per core. It does not appear that Samsung intends on keeping these chips to themselves, though: Samsung apparently hopes to sell the compontents to other manufacturers as well.
Could Apple be one of them? Maybe not, but it seems obvious that Apple will have a chip with similar capabilities available around the same time. If that’s right, then next year’s A6 CPU might boast 2GHz clock speeds per core. Just imagine demoing Infinity Blade on that.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
8 responses to “Samsung Rep May Have Just Tipped 2GHz, Dual-Core iPad 3”
Great journalistic speculation. The photo for the article is larger than the article.
just out of interest, will the chip specs top out more quickly on a phone because of the limitations of the hardware or will they slowly replace other computers like laptops, by using a range of optional accessories and leach into old markets?
I guess this is what 28nm (or 32nm – I don’t know what Samsung’s next fab process will be – probably HKMG, maybe double-patterned immersion lithography) will bring to the table for low power ARM SoCs.
Especially if they include a much lower power background processor for common, but low-resource tasks. Why turn on a 2GHz core to do what a 50MHz core can do? Note that 2GHz core might not clock down reliably to 50MHz either, so including a small, dedicated (but API compatible) low power core is the best design. An ARM Cortex M3, for example.
I think I read somewhere that the Core processors of the A5 will scale up very nicely. Add the physical real estate to handle the extra heat dissipation, Apple has some room to grow. If they decide to go with the SGX543m4 like psp3, they samsung will have some real competition. We’ll just have to wait and see. The power in the Ipad2 is in the graphics. Motorola never expected that in Mar.