Details about Apple's new A6 processor have slowly been filtering out since the iPhone 5 was officially announced last week, but now that teardown sites are receiving and dismantling their phones, we're beginning to get a clearer picture of what makes the new SoC tick. We already knew that Apple was using a custom-made 1GHz dual-core ARM CPU to achieve the advertised speed increases, but the graphics processor remained a mystery—now, analysis of the A6 die from AnandTech has confirmed that Apple is using a triple-core GPU with slightly higher clock speeds to double the graphics power of the A5.

The GPU itself is most likely a PowerVR SGX 543MP3, a part that should be familiar to anyone who pays attention to Apple's chips: the dual-core SGX 543MP2 is already in the A5 that powers the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, third-generation Apple TV, and fifth-generation iPod touch; and the quad-core SGX 543MP4 is in the A5X SoC that powers the high-resolution screen of the 2012 iPad. The combination of the extra graphics core, reportedly higher clock speeds, and the increased overall memory bandwidth of the A6 are all enough in total to achieve the doubled performance over the A5 that Apple boasted of at its September 12 press conference.

We'll be taking an in-depth look at the new A6 SoC and its performance in next week's review of the iPhone 5.