T-Mobile Netherlands has recently posted a product page of Apple’s shortly upcoming iPhone 3G S which lists some info regarding the new phone’s hardware frequencies. In addition, AnandTech has taken the initiative to expose the specifics of the underlying CPU and GPU architectures in the iPhone 3G S and the performance differences we can expect over the two previous generation models.

According to AnandTech's hardware analysis, the iPhone 3G S integrates a Samsung S5PC100 SoC (System-on-Chip) design consisting of an ARM Cortex A8 processor and PowerVR SGX graphics processor. Interestingly, the new competing Palm Pre uses the same SoC Apple uses although it is integrated into TI's OMAP 3430 processor. Both designs are built on the 65nm process, up from the 90nm ARM11 chips found in the iPhone and iPhone 3G.



In short, the iPhone 3G S processor runs at 600MHz and uses 256MB of DDR memory, up from 412MHz and 128MB of DDR in the iPhone 3G.



"If the ARM11 is like a modern day 486 with a very high clock speed, the Cortex A8 is like a modern day Pentium," says Anand Lal Shimpi. " The A8 lengthens the integer pipeline to 13 stages, enabling its 600MHz clock speed (confirmed by T-Mobile Netherlands here). The Cortex A8 also widens the processor; the chip is now a two-issue in-order core, capable of fetching, decoding and executing two RISC instructions in parallel."

Anand goes on to analyze the real world performance of the PowerVR SGX graphics processor in the iPhone 3G S as well as his insights regarding improvements for future hardware revisions of the phone.

More here.