Whilst we’ve all been astounded by the Palm news today, even the larger sites are praising Palm, and of course we are all overloaded by everything flooding out of CES. We seem to be forgetting, that quietly, in another corner of the United States, MacWorld is spinning quietly on its axis.

MacWorld hasn’t provided any stunning surprises, except for one jaw dropping rumour. A Quad Core processor for the iPhone. Somehow that makes me think of something like this

At the same time last year

THE RAGE was a mini laptop of some sort from apple, smaller than the Air, but with more power.  Well how about rebuilding the iPhone with a processor that rivals most laptops. As a concept, a processor the size of the current processors used in mobile phone sized devices, sporting Quad Core tech, would actually equate to, the iPhone matching any netbook on the market for CPU speed. Hard to make sense of, isn’t it? In the original post from ZDnet the iPhone and Play Station Portable are on a par, processor wise

While the current iPhone has (roughly) the processing power of the Sony PSP, an upgraded four core iPhone would slaughter pretty much every portable gaming platform on the market. The other part of the story is firmware 3.0, which is said to be required on the iPhone “quad.”

The other big thing here is a version update for the firmware to support the new processor, to 3.????

The questions are

• Is this sort of micro-processor technology available?
• If Apple have the means to do this, do Microsoft?
• HTC have been upping RAM in their devices, CPU speed seems to have topped at 512Mhz?
• If there are CPU’s that are this compact, why haven’t we heard of them before?

I would dismiss this as a WTF, but,

Four core iPhones and firmware 3.0 | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com