Some words about the A4 chip

This chip has arrived along with the iPad.

Called the A4, ("A" presumably for Apple), the most obvious difference with the chip in the iPhone 3GS is speed. The iPad's chip runs at 1GHz, compared to the estimated 600MHz (0.6GHz) of the iPhone 3GS. At the event in San Francisco, the A4 was billed as "the most advanced chip" Apple has done yet.

While fast, it's also frugal with power. "The A4 chip is so power efficient that it helps iPad get up to 10 hours of battery life," according to Apple's iPad Web page.
The A4 is a system-on-a-chip, or SOC, that integrates the main processor, graphics silicon, and other functions like the memory controller on one piece of silicon--not unlike what Intel is trying to achieve with its future "Moorestown" Atom processor. And a similar SOC chip architecture is already used in the iPhone and other smartphones, such as Google's Nexus One and Motorola's Droid. Based on what Apple has achieved with the iPhone 3GS, the chip should deliver a snappy interface. Of course, as in any 3G smartphone or laptop with a 3G connection, the 3G service can often be the weak link in performance, not the processor.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs described the iPad the "best (Web) browsing experience you've ever had". He referred that the A4 is a system-on-a-chip with a CPU, GPU, I/0 and memory controller.. A whole Web page right in front of you that you can manipulate with your fingers. Way better than a laptop, in a video of the event streamed by CNET. That browsing experience, of course, will rely on the chip's ability to handle the background tasks as users access images and video.

Apple's iPad A4 Processor too is based on ARM Architechture

iPad has sold a million pieces in just under a month. Besides the Apple mystique, there has to be something great about the device. It is a form of personal computer, eminently suitable for media consumption and reading books. The face is all display there is no separate hanging wires to accommodate a keyboard or a mouse. The display itself is touch screen based and work with users' gestures. If you need it badly a virtual keyboard can be shown on the display for you.

All this powered by a processor named A4. With Apple acquiring the company that designed the A4, it is now Apple proprietary chip. So what does this processor contain!Young Choi of UBM TerchInsights did some analysis and first hand checking. Following data is from his publication. The details are very interesting! I'll strongly suggest you read the original article too. This here post will give you the highlights only.

The processor is a ARM Cortex A8 processor, operates at 1 GHz and is capable of producing 1.94 Dhrystone MIPS. It has a 64 KB L1 and 640 KB L2 cache.

Android Tablet To Compete with iPad

Verizon, the communication carrier and Google are coming together to offer a tablet category device. They expect it to compete head to head with the hugely popular iPad by Apple and AT &T. What's interesting is that the device will have Android, the operating system from Google. Another interesting part is that Google is actually getting into device hardware making.

I had talked about elsewhere how the tablet may the evolution of the personal computer. This may be the form our personal computing is shaping into instead of a laptop or even a netbook. The competition is going to be tough. The iPad reportedly sold a million units over the first 28 days of its availability. That is a tough challenge to catch up with. So the value offered in the device plus communications access will have to be really good to appeal to customers in general. there's the Apple glamor factor to contend with. I'll be trying to find out what processor is going to go into it. I would not be surprised if it's another avatar of ARM that turns up in the device again. having conquered the mobile phone space ARM has been moving into other spaces too. The iPad itself is built on A4 processor that is a customized version of the ARM!

Read the announcement here.

The Nvidia Tegra Processor

The capability to handle MPEG4 video, compressed and decompressed with H.264 codec, HD video at 1080p resolution are increasingly becoming important for personal computing platforms. The tablet format is viewed as one of the important platforms for consumption of the high definition video, be it from Blu-ray DVDs or through streaming video from the Internet. One of the interesting approaches is to use a high performance graphics processor configuration with general purpose processors. NVIDIA's Tegra processor is one such example.

While the original Tegra appeared last year, this Jan saw the release of the next generation of Tegra processor and they are appearing in some tablet models. Besides being low power processor configuration, it contains two ARM cores and graphics processors to make 1080p video processing a comfortable task for the processor Tegra 250. Tegra family already includes TPX 2500, TPX 2600, TEgra 600 and the latest 650 that was announced in Jan.
Resources


About Tegra
Nvidia Announcement