Will the leap from the A5 to the new A6 be larger than the leap from A4 to A5?

Point me to a link that has any real information about the chip (like... If it even exists at all)... And I could give an informed opinion.
But since absolutely NOTHING has been published about it (like if it's even being developed) nobody can say what it might be capable of.
Sure, it's safe to assume that Apple is working on a successor to the A5, and it's probably safe to assume it will be more powerful, but anything more specific than that would be pure speculation. Apple's pretty tight-lipped about this stuff.

It would be a reasonable guess to say we will see substantial improvements. Of course those improvements could be in power usage as much as anything.

The 20x better graphics/better than modern console graphics rumor leads me to believe that yeah, we'll see some sort of nice leap.

Often more than a year passes after Imagination release info on new GPU units and chips actually using those GPUs.

Sounds like it will. 20x better gpu performance? It smashes it's way into console territory beyond all doubt!

A landmark moment for gpu mobility performance in smartphones and tablets?

PS3 + quality graphics in something that thin that can be piped to a 50 inch tv?

Gameover to the consoles...M$, Sony and Nintendo.

That kind of power elbowed into TV? Smartphones and tablets? (Or even a Macbook Air at some point in the future?) An aTV with that much power? Frightening. A thin tablet with that much power? Insane.

With that much power, the 'Mac' for all of us finally becomes a reality. And it includes a retina screen? At £399?!!

With that sort of escalation...how long until the iOS platform begins to eat the Mac platform? The process has maybe already begun. But that's another debate.

Is this the same Apple that once sold 2k-4k towers?

Yes. A 'landmark moment.'

Lemon Bon Bon. :o

Yeah, it seems the 20x refers to a 2013 GPU. This year, the jump will be significant (> 2x) but nowhere near 20x. At the very best, it will be the same 'up to 9x' we've seen going from the A4 to A5 but it was really 7x (even Bob Mansfield referred to it as 7x faster in the marketing vid).

They can do something like the iPhone 4 with the new iPad - higher resolution screen, Siri, 4x faster GPU but no noticeable improvement in performance due to more pixels being rendered. Then the 3S comes later with the fast GPU in 2013.

Or, they can keep the same resolution, bump the GPU by 4-8x, add Siri, call it the 2S, sort out the screen glare using polarisation and have the iPad 3 in 2013 with a retina display and PowerVR 6 to drive it possibly along with a tweaked design and a convergence between iOS and Mac OS.

I'm convinced though that a faster GPU will come simply to support the extra pixels I do think those extra pixels are a given.

However given a process shrink, pretty much a given, the reduced power draw and smaller feature size could easily result in a 50% clock rate increase. So even a dual core machine has the potential to be much faster.


It is really hard to say if Imaginations new GPU will make it in, Apple has been very aggressive with iOS devices in the past though. However some of Imaginations GPUs can be configured with even more cores than Apple is currently using. I could see A6 being a wash having to drive those extra Pixels.

Apple could put priority of those extra transistors on other tech to help lower power and increase performance.

Except that iPhone 4S was a significant upgrade. I think we will see some performance increases because Apple is keenly aware of the various competitive threats out there. They will not want to rest least some respectable hard ware comes out.

It should be noted that various manufactures have successfully taped out 2GHz ARM cores for use in SoC.

IPad 3 will be a little better than that. I suspect that iOS and MacOS will grow farther apart even as they cross pollinate.

More than anything though I'm hoping that IPad 3 has far more RAM. RAM more than anything limits the direction that iOS can go along with apps. RAM is an element that is often ignored when discussing future CPUs and GPUs.

Yes defiantly more ram. That being said though I am still impressed at how iPad2 gets along with only 512 mb of ram. Even a Android tablet with 512 mb is more then usable, heck Microsoft's new Metro for WP7 is fine with such little ram. I am really amazed at the speed of that system, especially with only a single core ARM processor, wow .

I really like the ARM cpu, I can't wait to see how Windows 8 performs on it or even maybe OSX down the line when ARM gets to 8 cores. Actually for sh*ts a giggles I installed Ubuntu 10.10 for ARM on my Asus Slider over the weekend and it was more then usable, fast even, this was without a suitable 2d or 3d acceleration graphics to.

I also own a Genesi Efika MX Smartbook and that thing flies for those who don't know what that is; it's a ARM Netbook that runs a Freescale 800 mhz A8 ARM processor with only 512 mb of ram and Ubuntu 10.10 as it's OS. Talk about obscure I know but you got to try the thing if you get the chance or oohh the new Hercules eCafe with the same specs and 11 hour battery for less then 250.

Sorry way off subject here, I think what ever Apple releases next hardware wise will be awesome like always, software, well just give me DIVX, drop the need for iTunes for updating, backing up or whatever and a proper file-manager and I'll be a happy clam. You know the things that Android users have had since the beginning. Hey I didn't say flash ... oh wait.