iPad CPU yields up (some) secrets to x-ray scan And the best way of seeing what's inside the A4 processor that powers Apple's iPad is? Take the chip out and x-ray it, of course, and that's what gadget repair house iFixit and semiconductor specialist Chipworks have done. Having pulled apart an iPad, iFixit passed the processor on to Chipworks, which then went to town on the …
It looks as though this is precisely a 1GHz version of the iPhone 3GS's 600MHz setup in a single package. I don't know how much performance boost comes from putting the DRAM in the same package, but the most worrying thing for the competition must be the performance Apple is getting out of this, which can't have much (if any) tuning from the PA Semi acquisition, as well as not having an A9 or dual core.
Intel may well find their pricing power being eroded over the next couple of years.
So I went to bed watching a few videos from some old tv show from the 1980's and one thing I noticed was that the ipad does not get hot at all while watching videos.
I am about the charge the unit and do not expect any heat issues like the iphone does when charged.
Good to see a return to writing good, optimised code instead of relying on raw horsepower to make up for poor coding practices.
It's also another reason for not installing Flash on the device.
It'll be interesting to see how iPhone OS 4.0—which is expected to include multitasking—performs.
I have been privy to some of the code in an Apple competiors phone, and the quality/optimisation was, to be frank, quite dreadful. The company in question were told, but were much more interested in adding new features, or getting us to make our bit faster to compensate (There are limits!), than making their code work faster. Example - 4 pages of code to implement a function I wrote in 10 lines.
Well done Apple for writing decent code.
Anon - because I don't want people to think I applaud Apple for something.
They satisfy the insatiable curiosity in all of us: the desire to answer that ultimate question of "How does the darn thing tick?" I just seem to love it when they acquire some cool new device and take it apart piece by piece to see just what's under the hood. Not to mention their results can be quite enlightening.
How is it an iPod touch if it has an Apple CPU? sure, it's an ARM core but so is almost every single mobile phone out there. The iPod touch uses a much slower core, the 3GS has the fastest CPU of all the iPhones or iPods.
If they used an x86 core then they would need emulation to run iPhone apps, why bother when it doesn't need to run x86 code.
What's wrong with it running the UI as the iPhone or iPod touch? it is designed 100% for touch. Not like some half baked touch -> mouse/keyboad hack that Microsoft installed on Windows.
If you want a big touch screen device with 100% touch UI then get an iPad. If you want Windows on the move get a laptop. If you want a 100% touch screen UI version of Windows then dream on. Have a look at HP Slate if you want a laugh.
I'm pretty sure a giant Windows Phone 7 will appear, from a Windows OEM at some point.
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