Apple has announced that the iPhone 5 will come with a whole new chip. It’s called the A6, which is a semi-surprising upgrade to this year’s iPad’s A5X chip.
There’s no word yet on whether it’s quad-core or not, but it’s 22 per cent smaller than the old A5 and has twice the graphics power. Considering the A5X was a huge graphics leap itself from the A5, we’ll be keen to see how it stacks up in performance.
As reference, the A5X at the time was billed as twice as powerful graphically as the A5 as well. That’s a little confusing, but we’ll figure it out once the official specs are released. Either way, that soft stat represents a boost in CPU performance from the A5X. Apple also claims that it makes all these gains in performance while actively increasingly battery efficiency.
Cocktail napkin maths would suggest that the A6 went to a 1GHz or 1.5GHz quad-core processor, leaving behind the dual-core A5x, but there’s nothing official from Apple just yet.
For now, you can certainly expect that the A6 chip in the iPhone 5 will best its predecessor in terms of graphics and battery life.