ARM is demonstrating the first working example of a multicore processor that may dramatically speed up smartphones.

Meanwhile, Apple is looking for iPhone engineers that can write multithreaded code that may take advantage of ARM’s breakthrough, strengthening rumors this chip may end up in a future iPhone.

Limiting press exposure to a private event, the chip designer along with Ericsson is running a chip based on its Cortex-A9 architecture on a Symbian-based test device at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The design uses between two and four cores and is a successor to the ARM11 technology that dominates the market, including the Samsung chip in all current iPhone and iPod touch models. Just as on a desktop, apps can split their work across multiple processors; ARM touts it as potentially much faster than a single-core processor, but says it could ultimately use less power by completing the same work with two cores at half the clock speed or by finishing other tasks sooner.

And while the exact usage if any of Cortex-A9 in a future iPhone is equally a mystery, the test has a potentially deep impact on Apple’s own plans. The firm is widely accepted as being a new but long-term client of ARM’s and, as such, has easy access to the new architecture as well as its own eventual replacements.

This chip may be coming to an iPhone design in the very near future, and will speed up the phone’s capability quite a bit.