why does the pre need a powerful cortex cpu for web apps? lol and dont anyone say for multitasking, its all over the press that but it does no more multitasking than an iphone, music / email / phone / text alerts, the iphone does all these in the background.

I don´t get most of what you say here. Could you explain in a simpler manner please?

You are forgetting that apple bought PA Semi, wich is famous for its power-efficient chips, and most probably Apple will usa a costumised (and exclusive) ARM CPU, so, looking at current ARM could be the wrong choise.

I have an iphone 3g and the battery life is complete garbage. They should focus on better battery life before they come out with more power draining processors.

You obviously do not understand power consumption very well. The higher the clock rate the higher the power. Multi core will allow you to provide the same or better performance at a lower clock rate which will result in a decrease in overall power requirements. If I operate two cores efficiently at 600MHZ vs a single at 1GHZ the single core will will have a higher power consumption, the problem is the applications need to be threaded so you can efficiently use both cores and the operating system need to efficiently make use of the multi-cores. I think you'll see the ARM A9 with a PowerVR GPU is in the next generation Iphone

" I think you'll see the ARM A9 with a PowerVR GPU is in the next generation Iphone"
A touch unlikely since the current iPhone (and many other small devices) already use an ARM11XX cpu. Why would they step back to an ARM9XX?

What I don't get is all this crap about the iPhone not having enough compute power to do flash etc. This is just ridiculous; until a year or so ago I used a 600MHz ARM based desktop machine as my main machine for making a living. It could do flash just fine. So could the 200MHz StrongARM machine that preceeded it. The ARM1136 in the iPHone has (on top of what my desktop machine had) a floating point vector processor, a graphics engine of some sort and a large cache. Somebody somewhere is writing some pretty low efficiency code.

@ Tim sorry to confuse you I was referring to the ARM Cortex A9 which is a follow on to the Cortex A8.

The ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor integrates the proven and highly successful ARM MPCore technology along with further enhancements to simplify and broaden the adoption of multicore solutions. The Cortex-A9 MPCore provides the ability to extend peak performance to unprecedented levels while also supporting design flexibility and new features to further reduce and control the power consumption at the processor and system level.

http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARMCortex-A9_MPCore.html

An SMP based iPhone is the most efficient way to control power and at the same time provide the sort of performance users expect in future devices. Beyond that people need to realize that there are several cores in an iPhone already, it's just they aren't executing user app code.

What a refactored iPhone might do is to implement dumber set of peripherials and move driver and low level code to run on the much higher performance SMP hardware. The SMP machine might have as many as four cores, one might be dedicated to a realtime OS to handle 3G and other communications needs.

The other thing that people need to realize is that a large scale SoC, of the type Apple is thinking about, will save a dramatic amount of power. More so if the implement that SoC on a much smaller chip process. It is very possible for Apple to offer up a faster iPhone while extending battery life.

Dave