Apple iPad 2, iPhone 5 To Have SGX543 Chip: 1080p And HDMI

This speed boost applies not only to graphics, such as drawing polygons in a video game or rendering fonts in a productivity app, but video processing as well. The A4 includes hardware acceleration for video decoding and encoding, and both appear to be used to support high quality video conferencing in Apple's FaceTime on iPhone 4. FaceTime and a front facing camera did not make the cut in the original iPad, but are expected on the new iPad 2.

Faster video processing could also enable Apple to upgrade the iPad and iPhone 4 from VGA-style component video output to the more modern HDMI.

The new POWERVR SGX543 delivers real-world performance of 35 million polygons/sec and 1 Gpixels/sec fillrate at 200MHz,* capable of driving HD screens with ultra smooth high definition 3D graphics. Even in a single-core solution POWERVR SGX543's performance is unprecedented in any GPU, demonstrating Imagination's pace of innovation and ability to drive the consumer experience in graphics to levels unheard of only a few years ago in anything less than high end specialist platforms.

Tony King-Smith, VP marketing Imagination Technologies says: "With POWERVR SGX543 Imagination continues to extend its leadership and dominance of the embedded graphics acceleration market with a solution capable of delivering blistering 3D, 2D and vector graphics. The Series5XT architecture enables us to continue to extend our dominance in mobile and embedded graphics solutions by addressing the rapidly growing demands for high performance graphics in a wide range of market segments."