If it's Thursday, it must be Apple Rumor Day. Here's another—the next iPhone will sport a quad-core chip for the first time, according to DigiTimes.
Earlier in the day, the Taiwanese tech journal also reported that Apple is tweaking the camera and battery on the current iPad.
Apple product rumors are a dime a dozen and often don't pan out. In this case, however, it's not a tremendous leap to imagine that Apple would opt for a quad-core design for the successor to the dual-core A5 and A5X chips it uses in its iPhone 4S and third-generation iPad, respectively (the A5X has a quad-core GPU, which Apple needed to gin up enough horsepower to drive the tablet's high-resolution Retina display).
As DigiTimes points out, HTC, Samsung, LG Electronics all have smartphones powered by quad-core chips on the market right now. More are expected to arrive as Qualcomm rolls out its lineup of Snapdragon quad-cores and Nvidia's quad-core Tegra 3 chipset migrates from tablets down to handsets.
Apple's rumored quad-core System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is based on Samsung's Exynos 4 design, DigiTimes reported, citing unnamed industry sources. The South Korean tech giant released the 1.4GHz Exynos 4 Quad in late April for its Galaxy series of devices. The 32-nanometer SoC, boasting four ARM Cortex-A9 CPU cores and four ARM Mali-400 MP4 GPU cores, first turned up in the Meizu MX 4-Core and Samsung's own Galaxy S III.
But aren't Apple and Samsung bitter foes in the courtroom, you ask? Sure, but that hasn't stopped Apple from turning to Samsung for the production of a whole slew of components it uses in its devices—including the A5 and A5X, which are built on Samsung's 45-nanometer, ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU design and which Samsung reportedly pumps out at its $3.6 billion semiconductor fab in Austin, Tex.
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