Edible Apple

Sluggishness and usability lags have been a minor yet persistent complaint from iPhone users. The upcoming Palm Pre, however, seems to have incredibly fast response times, and with the Pre set to do battle with a new iPhone this summer, Apple will hopefully furnish its new iPhone with a more capable processor.

Below, 9to5Mac has an interesting rundown of some of the possible processors Apple might pick to include in its upcoming and next-gen iPhone.

1. The TI OMAP 3430 chip that is in the Pre is a very quick chip. That is why the Pre has the horsepower to do all of that fancy multitasking you see in all of those videos. It has about double the horsepower of Apple’s current Samsung and can use less power (see why Apple should be changing?). It is also in a few other hot new devices like the Open Pandora and the Archos phone.

2. Samsung’s ARM Cortex A8 S5PC100 followup to their iPhone chip (schematic pictured above). This would be the easiest migration route and would require the least amout of low level code changes. It looks to be on roughly the same level as the TI OMAP 3430. Also, Apple buys lots of Flash from Samsung so their partnership is already strong.

3. Apple/PA Semi could be building their own chip. After all, this is what Jobs said they bought the company for. It will still likely be based on an ARM Cortex architecture and, like all of these other chips (except NVIDIA – which have their own hard-core GPU), work with Imagination’s multi-core GPU.

4. Macrumors said they’ve heard claims that the Marvell PXA168 ARM XScale chip is going to be the next iPhone chip. While this is kind of a wild card (Intel sold the XScale technology used to build the ARM processor to Marvell in 2006 for $600 million), Apple has been known to do some interesting things.

5. NVidia, Apple’s partner on DisplayPort technology on its new Mac line as well as OpenCL partner, has an incredible ARM line called Tegra. Their chips have been shown to run head to head with Intel’s Atoms at multiples less power usage. These chips are rumored to be entering Netbooks running Ubuntu and Android shortly. Apple invests in and loves Imaginations GPU chips so it is unlikely that they would use NVIDIA’s.

You can check out the full article over here. It’s definitely worth checking out.