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New iPhone ARM Architecture Revealed?
Know your ARM from your elbow? If so, you may suited to become the latest of Mr Jobs many, many disciples based up at Cupertino cloud 9. That is if quickly snapped-up info from our keen eared friends at macrumours is anything to go by.
You may remember my blog from earlier this week, when I took pleasure in divulging the latest of the more credible speculations on the specifications of the highly anticipated new iPhone. Well today it seems we have another tasty nugget of insight into the pixie dust inside the must-have gadget of this summer.
Apple has posted a job opportunity for an experienced ARM processor coder. And not just any coder - they’re looking for a low level ARM super-geek, not only familiar with the architecture itself but specifically its built-in vector processing system “NEON”. Such a lucky person will be involved in:
"designing, enhancing and improving various subsystems running on iPhone OS."
This is interesting for a few reasons, firstly (and amusingly) because it would appear Apple is obviously concerned with the competence of its own ARM-NEON expertise. More importantly because it’s the vector unit they’re interested in. I’m not going to get overly technical here, but vector units are the bits of processors that handle all the really fiddly mathematics. Such systems are prominent in environments that have a lot of 3D graphics – all that lovely eye candy in your latest first person shoot-em-up is made possible through the use of high-powered programmable vector units, more commonly known as graphics cards.
Are Apple planning on getting all 3D on us? Is the next iPhone going to be sporting some sexy interface sauce the like we’ve never seen before? Perhaps... perhaps not. I may be jumping head first into conclusions here – and I’ll be honest, I’m not hugely educated on the internal architecture of the current iPhone. Perhaps it’s already known to be fitted with separate 3D processing facilities (I’ll ask Digital Goldfish) and the extra vector processing performance is require for something far more mundane.
Still, it’s great to finally see the first signs of a steady stream of speculation on the new iPhone.
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