iOS 4.3 Beta Hints at OpenCL-Capable SGX543 GPU in Future Devices

When it comes to the graphics performance on Apple's iOS devices, the company has been sticking with the powerful POWERVR SGX535 GPU from Imagination Technologies for quite some time, introducing it on the iPhone 3GS and carrying it through into the company's own A4 system-on-chip designs for the brains of the iPad and iPhone 4. But hints included in the new iOS 4.3 beta seeded to developers earlier this week indicate that Apple may be preparing to move to Imagination Technologies' next-generation GPU architecture with the SGX543 on future devices.



Introduced for licensing in January 2009, the SGX543 appears to only just now be coming ready for inclusion in mobile devices, and the new iOS 4.3 beta SDK includes references to a driver bundle supporting the graphics processor core.

The SGX543 is said to deliver performance of 35 million polygons per second and a filtrate of 1 billion pixels per second when running at 200 MHz, compared to 28 million polygons per second and a filtrate of 500 million pixels for the SGX535 running at the same clock speed. In addition, the SGX543 offers support for the Apple-backed OpenCL specification that allows applications to harness untapped potential of both CPUs and GPUs for processing purposes. Finally, the SGX543 support multi-core configurations allowing for even greater performance.