A5-Equipped iPhone 4s Sent To Developers In Anticipation of iPhone 5?

One of the strongest indicators yet (aside from logical deduction and its inclusion in the in the iOS 4 SDK) that iPhone 5 is going to come with Apple's dual-core A5 central processing unit (CPU) chip is a report from 9To5Mac's Mark Gurman who thinks Apple is fixing to put greater emphasis on gaming performance as a central marketing point for its next-generation smartphone.

Apple describes it's A5 processor as a 1GHz, dual-core, custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip. It is manufactured to an Apple design by Samsung of Korea. More technically, The A5 incorporates a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU and a dual-core PowerVR SGX543MP2 graphocs processing unit (GPU). Apple claims that the A5, which has 512 MB of on-board low-power DDR2 RAM clocked at 1066 MHz, is twice as powerful in terms of CPU performance and its GPU up to nine times powerful compared with the A4 chips used in the iPhone 4.

Mark Gurman observes that the A5 will support exponentially greater gaming horsepower thanks to that 9x improvement in GPU power compared with the iPhone 4, and that Apple has already seeded some iPhone 4s hot-rodded with A5 muscle "under the hood" to select developers involved with high-level gaming, one of whom has dubbed it the "iPhone 4S."

However, Gurman emphasizes that this souped-up iPhone 4 is not "necessarily" the next-gen iPhone, but likely just top secret pre-production development prototypes cobbled together to help developers ready their wares for the iPhone 5 speed bump that reportedly are stored in safes on company premises when not in use.

Nevertheless, their very existence demonstrates that one avenue Apple could take on its iPhone evolution roadmap would be to come out with an actual iPhone 4S sometime between now and the fall with the A5 chip plus perhaps an 8 megapixel camera and some of the other upgrades that have been rumored for the iPhone 5 that would work with the iPhone 4 form factor, leaving the iPhone 5 designation for a much more radical change to be introduced during the first half of 2012.

Some frustrated fans would probably bridle at that approach, but it would address the immediate needs of folks faced with renewing their service contracts, providing them with a performance boost that should stay competitive for a couple more years at least while avoiding a rush to production for the iPhone 5 until the iPad 2 supply backlog clears and issues associated with the Japanese earthquake breach disasters are stabilized.

I'm not saying that's what's going to happen, but just that it would be a viable alternative possibility.

[iphone5newsblog.com]