In Theory: Will Apple Launch a Home Games Console?

This boost in gaming capabilities has taken the industry by surprise, but prior to the iPad 2 reveal, some developers thought that Apple may have had a trick or two up its sleeve. Last week, Firemint shipped an update to Real Racing 2 HD which enabled 1080p gameplay at 30 frames per second on an HDTV via the iPad 2's optional HDMI output.

"In anticipating the iPad 2 release we were actually working with a matrix of different possibilities for what it might be, as time went by and we heard rumours we would adjust the probabilities in each configuration," Firemint's Rob Murray says.

"We worked on basically two versions for iPad 2, one was built for about 25 per cent to 50 per cent performance increase, the other was the 'hit it out of the park' kind of performance increase. When we saw the keynote we switched gears rapidly to the 'hit it out of the park' version that meant that we were finishing off a new graphics set that we had been working on. Even with our 'hit it out of the park' version we were able to turn on full screen anti-aliasing and many other effects that we didn't think would make it, so Apple surprised us also, but I think we were far more ready for it than other developers."

With a processor as inexpensive to produce and as powerful as A5, Apple has the chance to bring a home console to market that could offer serious value.

Real Racing 2 HD is a great iOS game, but still some way off the standards set by high budget PS3/360 releases - but of course it was developed and sells at a fraction of the price. That said, right now it's early days in terms of making use of the colossal increase in power the A5 chip represents. Firemint's game is scaling up from an existing iOS project and wasn't designed from the ground up for the new hardware.

The same could be said for Epic/Chair's Infinity Blade, but regardless, on iPad 2 it is a phenomenally good-looking game with a superb performance level. While it struggles to sustain anything like 30FPS on iPad 1, it easily exceeds it on iPad 2, adding additional effects and even appears to be super-sampling - running at a much higher native resolution before being scaled down, pretty much the best form of anti-aliasing you can get, if you have the power available. If iPad 2 can run games like this without even breaking a sweat, what can be achieved when developers address the new generation of performance directly?

Even in its current A5 guise, there's little doubt that Apple's mobile architecture is capable of some seriously pretty visuals. But the beauty of the hardware design is that it is eminently scalable. There's nothing theoretical about this, the tech's finalised and ready to roll - the PowerVR SGX543 in the iPad 2 scales all the way up to 16 cores, and IMG tells us that its architecture is suitable for "anything demanding performance: console, computing etc".

Indeed, we already have a mass market example of this scalability in the offing: Sony's NGP SoC combines a quad core ARM Cortex A9 with Power VR SGX543 MP4 - two iPad 2 A5s stuck together if you like. Sony actually describes its NGP GPU as a SGX543 MP4+.

"That's to indicate the work Sony has done to implement the graphics," IMG says. "What they licensed is a SGX543 MP4."

While rumours concerning Nintendo's Project Cafe point towards a traditional PowerPC CPU and AMD GPU pairing, Apple's approach in combining low power ARMs with PowerVR tech has clear advantages: the physical amount of silicon being used is much lower, meaning that the cost to fabricate the chips is cheaper. There are cost savings elsewhere too - for starters, cooling assemblies would be significantly cheaper, if they are actually needed at all.

While the option to scale up the existing architecture is very much a viable approach, it also introduces a number of challenges to Apple, as well as games publishers and developers - issues that perhaps make such an approach unlikely. Having just rolled out an enormously improved architecture, it doesn't really follow that Apple would instantly follow it up with another one, with all the additional R&D and production costs that entails. Far better to get it right the first time and roll it out across multiple devices.

Secondly, a direct challenge to Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would mean a seismic shift in the nature of the iTunes App Store and it's highly unlikely that the existing ecosystem could sustain the price tags required by home console AAA game budgets. This would make a direct Xbox 360/PS3 competitor an unwise move for Apple. Approaching one Xbox 360 developer on the subject of an iOS home console, the response was simple: "There's no way I can sell my game for 59p".

With a processor as inexpensive to produce and as powerful as A5, Apple has the chance to bring a home console to market that could offer serious value - and it might not even be marketed as a console at all, certainly not in the way that we know it.