ARM showed off a new chip design that may offer a glimpse at things to come in the iPhone’s future at a private event earlier today. At the event, which was part of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, they showed off their new Cortex-A9 architecture, which uses between two and four cores and is the official successor to the iPhone and iPod touch’s ARM11 chipset.

Similar to multi-core chips in desktop computers, the Cortex-A9 allows programs to split their workload between the multiple processors. It also sports twice the floating point math power as the previous designs, and includes a NEON media accelerator for each core that takes over some of the functions of a digital signal processor like media encoding and decoding.

ARM says the new technology could potentially be much faster, but see the true benefit to be in completing the same workload as the older chips with significantly less power.

It’s not yet known if Apple will be using the Cortex-A9, but they are a long-term client of ARM, and PA Semiconductor is working on an ARM chip for the device, so either way the new technology will most likely impact them.

[via Apple Insider]

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