Posts tagged apple a4
iPad technical specifications
Apr 5th
We’re huge fans of the guys and gals over at iFixit.com — they’re incredibly quick with their teardowns and have given us a look into the hardware of the newest Apple device. Our editor, Josh Carr, runs Rocky Mountain Mac Repair and is very thankful he doesn’t have to crack one open without knowing what to expect.
Sifting through their teardown, there are some things we love and some thing that we really didn’t expect. Here’s a list of the notable specs:
- 2 large batteries inside to give it the advertised 10 hour battery life. 5 times the charge capacity of the iPhone 3GS
- Shares the same lift-out display style as the iPod touch.
- You’re gonna need a Torx set that goes to T4 if you want to open this one up. Normally, Apple stops at T6.
- The display cable mirrors that of a laptop unlike the iPhone and iPod touch.
- Cortex A8 series processor within Apple’s custom A4 SoC. The RAM is part of the SoC.
- Only 256MB of RAM… really? (We’re having an SNL moment here.)
- 3G Version will have GPS. This is new to us, we were hearing cell tower triangulation before.
- An impressive speaker assembly under the hood… similar appearance to the unibody MacBook speakers.
- The rumored camera hole looks nothing like it did in the “early prototype” photos and houses the Ambient Light Sensor.
- Don’t expect a super-cheap glass replacement on this; it will be much easier to just replace the glass and midplane assembly at the same time. What does that mean? You wouldn’t need to replace the LCD unless you broke that too, but the glass won’t be as easy as the current iPhone.
- There’s no real note on LCD manufacturer. The eIPS LCD may have been a bunch of hooey.
So, huge battery, smaller Torx screws, laptop display cable, GPS (3G only), cool speakers, no camera… but what about the SoC? Well, honestly, we’re really disappointed. Obviously, Apple wanted to go cheaper to make it more affordable for the masses, but this device is seriously lacking the “wow” factor when it comes to processing power. We can tell that the iPad is faster than the iPhone just by using it, but the difference is a lot smaller than we expected. It’s using the same generation Cortex processor as the iPhone 3GS but clocked to 1GHz instead of 600MHz: a nice speed increase. It’s also using the same graphics processor, the PowerVR SGX 535. The RAM is a very disappointing 256MB but appears to be a step up from the iPhone RAM. According to AppleInsider, the speed improvements are related to the faster processor and a theory that the RAM is reading and writing data in “64-bit chunks.” We’re also wondering about Apple’s decision to stop at 64GB… we think that 128GB was completely obtainable, but the current pricing structure would have put that near $1000 — a little steep for an iPod touch on mushrooms.
Introducing the iPad with these technical specifications could limit its potential in the near future. It currently gives developers a platform to showcase more graphically demanding applications, but new iPad apps will need to run on the first generation even if hardware advancements take place in the next generation.
If you look at the iPhone, many apps obviously run better on the 3GS than they do on the first generation, but they’re still the same applications. At this point, all apps are compatible with every iPhone (minus GPS requirements) and there hasn’t been any indication of first generation iPhone incompatibility. No offense to the 1st gen owners out there, but we hope this doesn’t continue much longer. Applications should advance right along with the hardware. We fully expect to see speed bumps in the rumored “iPhone HD” but, under the current SDK restrictions, developers will still need to write their apps with the 1st generation in mind. The current processing power of the iPad will limit developers when they look at the next generation. It would have been nice to see the iPad appear with a little more oomph (more RAM at the minimum) so apps aren’t restricted to the power of the first generation.
The iPad makes everything look great from a performance standpoint, but the real truth is this: Google’s Nexus One has more oomph under the hood than the iPad… the same goes for other smartphones out there. We were hoping for 1GB of RAM in the iPad and 512MB of RAM in the next iPhone. Even if that amount of RAM isn’t necessary in a mobile product, Apple has decided it’s unnecessary for the next year at minimum.
Check out iFixit’s new beta program they’re launching when you visit the site; it looks awesome. We’ve already signed up as Rocky Mountain Mac Repair… if you’re a techie, you should too.
Apple’s A4 SoC: awesome, but barely
Mar 2nd
It was a slow Monday, but the one thing worth noting is the supposedly new information about Apple’s custom iPad chip. It appears as though all of the high hopes we had for the iPad’s processor have been shot out of the sky by recent rumors about the System-on-a-Chip (SoC). Information has slowly leaked out about the processor since the annoucement on the 27th of January. First there was the definition of custom silicon versus a custom chip, then there were rumors that it wasn’t designed by the team from P.A. Semi, and finally we have a somewhat less blurry picture of the chip from Ars Technica and a few of their sources. Brace yourself–they claim that it’s not as awesome as it used to be.
Ars explains in the article something that we’ve been saying since our initial analysis of the iPad: it’s not the hardware that will make it popular, it’s the software. We obviously agree: the software expandability of the App Store on a device as large as the iPad will make it tremendously popular. We still wish that Apple would loosen up their approval process a bit, but there’s a lot of great software in the App Store nonetheless.
So what’s not awesome about the SoC? Well, it may not be the chip we thought it was. Ars says it’s definitely not cutting-edge: far from it, actually. The only impressive feature is the lack of features this chip has built-in. If Ars’ sources are correct, it actually runs on the ARM Cortex A8 instead of the A9 as originally assumed. The author also claims it to be single core — no extra oomph for the iPad. It’s also running the PowerVR SGX GPU instead of the newer Mali GPU some analysts predicted. While that’s still a pretty decent SoC, it’s nothing amazing… and that’s probably why Apple’s been fairly secretive with the specifications.
The iPad is limited in hardware: that actually helps the SoC perform better and consume less energy. At this point, there’s no camera that we know of (that could still change between now and the launch). The multitouch display uses one Input/Output channel, the device connects to your computer and charges via one I/O channel, and the video out is sent along an analog channel. That’s not much for I/O and requires very little from the SoC itself. Modern SoC’s ship with many more capabilities than the iPad needs at this point… that could be the driving reason for Apple to develop custom silicon. They wanted to offer us the best battery life possible by building a chip that had just enough hardware to make the device run. That’s a pretty good strategy, but we’re not sure it’s worth the billion dollar price tag that some analysts claim.
Limiting hardware limits future potential. We think the handicapped A4 is possible but we don’t think it’s in Apple’s best interest. If they really did strip out everything non-essential to the functionality of the device, we’re looking at another re-design if they decide to add more features in the future. Again, that’s a huge issue if a SoC really costs a billion bucks to produce. Everyone wants a camera in the iPad… everyone. Why would Apple invest so much money into a first generation device and do it again for the next model. Take a look at the iPod and the iPhone: each gained considerable amounts of traction and features with time. Actually, the more we think about it, the more intelligence Ars’ theory loses over time.
It’s great to have sources that want to share this kind of information with you, but we need to seriously re-examine how we share that information as truth, rumor or possibility. Not once did Ars mention the reliability of their sources. Not once did they mention the fact that they’re still guessing because no one will truly know until we can take it apart. In fact, they really started two more rumors: it’s running an ARM Cortex A8 and a PowerVR SGX GPU. We already knew the potential makeup of the iPad SoC, we won’t know what it really is until we see it, so why not add more speculation to the news-hungry internet? Why not?
The ultimate truth: yes, it’s possible that Ars’ sources and speculation is correct, but don’t hold it as fact just yet. Until the iPad comes out, we can only hope for the great hardware we initially thought was in the device. Once we have ours torn apart, we’ll let you know what we find. Until then, drink a beer, relax… and maybe stop turning nothing into nothing that makes money.
iPad Analysis Part Two: The Hardware
Jan 31st
Welcome to the second part of our iPad analysis trilogy. Please make sure you have read the first post about the iPad’s software. We’ll be following this article up with our conclusion, which will combine everything we’ve learned about the software, hardware and hopefully formulate a verdict. Here’s everything that we know and you want to know about the hardware: things may change as we find out more about the iPad, but for now, what you see is what you get… and don’t forget to click the iPad to the right for an “exclusive story.” Warning: some parts have extreme technical content that we tried to break down into readable information.
Dimensions
The device itself is only 0.5 inches thick in the center and tapers off to the edges just like every other Apple mobile device currently on the market. It’s 9.56 inches tall and 7.47 inches wide… it weighs 1.5 pounds without the 3G assembly and 1.6 pounds with it (roughly five times the weight of an iPhone).
These dimensions are the root cause of all of our complaints with the hardware in this device. If Apple made it just a little bit thicker, they could have actually included useful connectors like a couple USB ports, a Mini DisplayPort or even a MagSafe connector for easier charging. We honestly love the fact that this device is so small, but we wouldn’t typically give up the expandability of a product in order to achieve something so thin.
