Concerning Apple’s next wave of iPhone models, we’ve heard more rumors than we can count, looking at everything from incremental updates over the iPhone 5, to new budget-priced models, to larger handsets than ever before. Of all those, the idea of a straight-up hardware refresh is probably the easiest to swallow, potentially arriving as the iPhone 5S. Today, we get a look at a circuit board purporting to belong to just such a phone, apparently showing off Apple’s next-gen A7 SoC.

If rumors are correct, the A7 could finally bring Apple into the world of quad-core smartphones, following the decision to make the A6 another dual-core chip. It may even run a little slower than the A6, maxing out at 1.2GHz, but the extra cores should easily swallow that difference. Reportedly, the A7 will use the PowerVR quad-core SGX554MP4 introduced in the A6X with the latest iPad. The chip could also spell a big increase in RAM, moving from the iPhone 5′s 1GB to 2GB, more in line with its Android competition.

We know, it would be trivial to Photoshop that “7″ on a picture of an iPhone 5 board, as the rest of it looks practically identical to the current-gen component, but iOSDoc insists this image comes from a reliable source.

Update: Looks like we were right to think of Photoshop; there’s some compelling evidence to suggest this is a doctored pic of the iPhone 5. Perhaps iOSDoc needs to reconsider that source of its.

Source: iOSDoc
Via: IntoMobile