Apple is reputed for its quality performance as reflected in the use of A4 system on a chip processor in the iPad and the iPhone 4, the iPod touch and Apple TV as well. Development is on for the next generation iPhone. However, if reports are to be believed, Apple may source core silicon chip components from Taiwan-based suppliers and is contemplating use of ARM architecture based A8 system-on-a-chip for the iPhone 5 and other devices.

The A4 chip runs at 1 GHz and has an ARM Cortex A8 processor core with PowerVR SGX 535 graphics on a single chip, offering blazing fast graphics on the iPad, iPhone 4 and iPod touch and also the second generation Apple TV.

The A8 SoC chip under consideration is said to have a dual core processor along with the PowerVR SGX 543 graphics capabilities. This lends credence to rumors that Apple plans a multi-core iPhone since the SGX 543 supports dual core processor as well as OpenGL (Open Computing Language) used on Mac OSX Snow Leopard. OpenGL permits the OS to benefit from the GPU for general purpose computing and makes for a best performance resulting from the CPU-GPU combination. There are indications that future iOS versions incorporating these changes with the A8SoC processor will improve the Apple devices. Since this processor might be power hungry and affect battery life it is up to Apple to come up with a suitable solution.

While these are just rumors, it is more than feasible that an iPhone with a dual core processor and a powerful graphics chip is in the offing, after the CES 2011 showcased a number of 4 inch screen phones with 1 GHz dual core Nvidia Tegra T20 mobile processor.