While the Internet has been awash with talk of the mildly disappointing (no multitasking, no Flash support, no USB/SD card slots, and yes – a silly name) Apple iPad – the eagle eyed may have spotted something altogether more interesting in yesterday’s announcement: Apple is now in the chip business.
This blockbuster news was only briefly touched upon by Steve Jobs during his keynote, but we’ve done a bit of digging and can now add some meat to those bones. What we already knew is that the chip is called the ‘Apple A4′ and comes 20 months after the Cupertino giant purchased chip business PA Semi in April 2008. What our digging tells us is quite a bit more: For a start, the A4 is a full chipset, fusing together a CPU clocked at 1 GHz, a GPU, 1/0 and memory controller, which means it is in direct competition with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Nvidia’s Tegra 2 platforms, to name but a few.
Furthermore, Apple is an ARM licensee, and while it is not known whether it uses an ARM CPU, PA Semi’s expertise is in Power Architecture (seen in the likes of the iPhone and the PS3), rather than proprietary processor design. This means a processor all of its own making is hugely unlikely, and both Bright Side of News and iFixit suggest the iPad is actually using a Cortex-A9 MPCore like that inside the iPhone 3GS, which is clocked at a lower 600MHz. Consequently, the iPad would align itself closer to smartphones and smartbooks than netbooks.
As for the graphics, they remain a mystery, but to work with existing iTunes apps it does have to be Open GL ES compatible, and I would be surprised if it again didn’t simply share the same CPU as the iPhone 3GS.
So who should be worried about this? Certainly Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Freecale and Nvidia will be cautious, but most concern is likely seen inside Intel HQ, since yet another major new product sector has ignored the Atom and its x86 architecture.
Perhaps that cherry of being able to run Windows isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?
(Photo credit to iFixit)
Gordon
