I like reading the rumors of a quad core iPhone coming soon, but I don't really believe them. If we ignore the problems with ARM's roadmap, and quad core Cortex processors in 2009, there are still many other issues that ruin the party. If there was an imaginary iPhone with a quad core ARM, it would need amazing power efficiency.
Instead of the tens of watts drawn by the Atom and supporting chipset, we're looking at something like a single watt using currently available ARM cores. Going by ARM's figures for their 2010 products, we can see 4 cores drawing 10 mw each (40 mw) in "average" use, and nothing in sleep states. However, the graphics chip on this device has
