Just discovered my posts about Titan were mentioned in this thread, and nobody knew what I was on about. I didn't give the whole story so I'll explain:

I attended a talk by Intrinsity at work where they talked about their technology and their involvement in Titan.

The idea behind Titan was to use the Intrinsity Fast14 technology on a cheap PPC. By using Fast14 they could make the chip fast and low power but they could also save money by using a 90nm process.

But, Titan wasn't an existing core with Fast14 added to it. It was a completely new core designed by Intrinsity under contract from AMCC.

When Apple bought Intrinsity I suspect Apple wanted the engineers to work on their projects and pretty much paid AMCC to drop Titan.

However since AMCC owned the design they could still port it to a different process, presumably without the Fast14 tech.

Titan was a specific implementation of the core, it got cancelled, and AMCC started work on a new implementation on IIRC 45nm.

So that why Titan was the core that was cancelled, but wasn't.

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BTW The Fast14 tech is very impressive, it can pretty much double performance without increasing power consumption. Before they were bought, there were rumours of Intrinsity working on a 2Ghz Cortex-A9.

I suspect the iPad 2 might be rather more potent than anyone suspects