Hardly a massive surprise considering the smarts of UK silicon design company ARM power over 95 percent of mobile phones, including the iPhone, but an industry source has confirmed to PocketGamer.biz that Apple will be using an ARM-designed chipset for its forthcoming tablet.

The exact chipset wasn't confirmed but we'd expect it to be ARM's multi processor Cortex-A9, running at 1GHz.

This makes complete sense in terms of ensuring games and applications are as compatible as possible between the various iPhones and the iSlate.

The original iPhone used an ARM 1176JZ architecture running at 412 MHz, while the iPhone 3GS upgraded to the ARM Cortex-A8 running at 600 MHz.

Competition for GPU

Both devices used Imagination Technologies' PowerVR GPU range to provide 3D graphics acceleration: the iPhone has the PowerVR MBX Lite 3D, while the 3GS the more powerful PowerVR SGX.

Again, we'd expect the iSlate to use a component from the PowerVR SGX Series5 range (probably the SGX540), despite ARM, no doubt, pushing the virtues of its rival Mali 200 and 400 range. Not only does Apple have 10 percent stake in Imagination Technologies, but using its design would ease compatibility issues for developers.

The only potential for an upset would be if Apple decided to go with Nvidia's Tegra 2 architecture, which made plenty of headlines at CES 2010.

It's also based on the Cortex-A9 and, linked with Nvidia's own GPU and media silicon, would certainly result in a very powerful piece of hardware, although compromising the power consumption.

Rival designs based on the Cortex-A9, include Qualcomm's Snapdragon (unlikely perhaps as it was used in Google's Nexus One, as well as the Motorola Droid and Nokia's N900), and Texas Instruments' OMAP 4.