This may come as a bombshell to you but the current A5 can easily drive a 2048 x 1536 display, it is way over designed, in such a fashion I think Apple would have gone Retina display if it weren't for the lack of displays.
They do not need a SGX543MP4 part at all, they could simply clock the MP2 part higher to gain the same performance as the PS Vita. Not that they need it.
45 nm to 32nm / 28 nm is nearly two full generation nodes (28 nm is two generations), so they could add anything they wanted and still make a smaller SoC than the current A5, while using less power. A Cortex-A9 core is tiny.
A Quad-core Cortex-A9 does not use twice the power due to power-gating.
Multi-core is basically handled by the OS and the APIs are freely available to developers.
It's not much of a bombshell - I'm an iOS developer and I specialise in realtime graphics
The A5 will drive a display with 4x more pixels for many apps yes, but for some it would seriously kill performance. Even if the app runs at 1024x768, after rendering it still has to blit the image to screen - and it has 4x more pixels to draw at that point. One of my own iPad apps pushes the SGX right to the limit - that extra blitting workload would push it over 100%, which means it would slow down - and it's a video recording app, slowing down means dropping frames, which is unacceptable.
A clock speed increase would obviously fix that. The final screen blit isn't a heavy job, I bet even a 10% increase would be enough. But even so, if they've increased camera quality (which they're rumoured to have done) I'll likely have to increase the internal rendering resolution (which is currently 1280x720, it would presumably go to 1920x1080 - over 2x more pixels). A clock speed increase won't be enough (they could push clock speed a bit higher but not double it without heat issues I suspect).
On the multicore stuff: yes, there are APIs available. It's not that simple though, you also have to design your application for parallel processing. For some jobs it's simple enough, for others it's very difficult. As a result, many developers don't actually do it at all - it's single threaded all the way. Also, a quad core processor DOES use more power when it's fully active. That would be rare of course, but still it's something they have to allow for.
You can argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin till the cows come home but the latest rumor on the front page seem to indicate it is gonna be a quad core A6. Looks solid.
https://www.macrumors.com/2012/02/0...-details-of-ipad-3-with-quad-core-a6-and-lte/
I'm not at all sure about those shots and the rumour. The photos looks reasonably legit, although they'd be easy enough to fake - but there's no indication I can see of it being quad core. There's a bit where it mentions 4 chips, but they're clearly marked as NAND - that would be the flash storage, not the processors. Also, look at the part numbers. The A4 was a 930X, the A5 with a big jump to dual core and new GPU was a 940X. The new part is listed as a 945X - that seems to imply it's a minor bump rather than a major change. A smaller, lower power chip? A faster version of the A5 with a bit more GPU or CPU power? Who knows, we'll find out soon enough.
One thing that I did notice on those screenshots: it shows the memory! 244,276 pages free, plus 839something used. The page size is 4KB, so that adds up to roughly 1GB. (And if they faked this, then they a) really know what they're doing, and b) went into great detail

)