Palm Pre's processor beats Apple iPhone's

While there are hundreds of hardware and then software layers on top of the processor, not much else can make as big an input on the overall abilities of a device than the horsepower it has under the hood.  In this race, Palm Pre's engine beats the (current!) iPhone and just about any other smartphone out there hands down.

That doesn't mean that by the time mid 2009 rolls around, the iPhone won't have a better engine, but we won't know until the second Apple is ready to tell us.

The current iPhone has an ARM 11-based architecture from Samsung (S3C6400).  While a popular chip with many advantages, it isn't state of the art - it might have been when iPhone was announced 2 years ago but now it is very "middle of the road".  And for battery draw (and heat?) reasons, Apple doesn't even crank it all of the way up.  It currently doesn't even reach 500MHz (out of a possible 667MHz).

As I stated last month, most new high-end multimedia phones will be coming with ARM Cortex A8-based microprocessors which offer roughly double the speed at, again roughly,  the same battery draw as the ARM 11 series processors.  These processors are even climbing up into netbook territory.

Palm's Pre is the first such phone to have a ARM Cortex processor.  By most accounts it is the TI OMAP 34x0 series.

I have to believe that Apple, when they do their yearly iPhone update in June/July (not just flash storage upgrade in the next month) will be able to match this processor with either their own PA Semi-based ARM Cortex processor or a Cortex processor from another vendor (but probably not quad-core).

To get an idea of what these processors are capable of, they have been rated at about the same speed at Intel's Atom processor per clock cycle.

From the TI OMAP 3440 Specs page:

• The OMAPâ„¢ 3 architecture combines mobile entertainment with high performance productivity applications
• Advanced Superscalar ARM® Cortexâ„¢-A8 RISC core enabling 3x gain in performance
• Designed in 65-nm CMOS process technology adds processing performance
• IVAâ„¢ 2+ (Image Video Audio) accelerator enables multi-standard (MPEG4, WMV9, RealVideo, H263, H264) encode/decode at D1 (720x480 pixels) 30 fps
• Integrated image signal processor (ISP) for faster, higher-quality image capture and lower system cost
• Flexible system support
  • Composite and S-video TV output
  • XGA (1024x768 pixels), 16M-color (24-bit definition) display support
  • Flatlinkâ„¢ 3G-compliant serial display and parallel display support
  • High Speed USB2.0 On-The-Go support
• Seamless connectivity to Hard Disk Drive (HDD) devices for mass storage
• Leverages SmartReflexâ„¢ technologies for advanced power reduction
• M-shieldâ„¢ mobile security enhanced with ARM TrustZoneâ„¢ support
• Software-compatible with OMAPâ„¢ 2 processors
• HLOS support for customizable interface
• Support for OpenGL ES 1.1

More on the Palm Pre from the IT BlogWatch.