Apple's A4 chip is ARM Cortex A9 with an ARM Mali GPU?

For some of us, amid all the hubbub about revolutions and whatnot yesterday, the most significant announcement on hand was Apple's supposedly custom A4 CPU. Alas, in the cold and brutal light of the morning after, we're hearing that it is in fact a system-on-a-chip driven by a Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU "identical" to the one found inside NVIDIA's Tegra 2, while besting the iPhone 3GS significantly with its 1GHz speed and multicore architecture. The A4 is composed of that Cortex barnburner, an integrated memory controller, and the Mali GPU, making it an all ARM affair -- though we still don't know how much Apple and PA Semi did in terms of arranging and integrating those components within the silicon. While still not 100 percent confirmed, it would seem there were no revolutions on the iPad's processing front -- just a rebranded bit of well engineered hardware.

[swarley178 Posted Jan 28th 2010 8:30PM]

i wish apple would put this in an iphone. lol with the power they claim it has it would be like putting a core i7 in a netbook.

[Tesla Posted Jan 28th 2010 9:17PM]

hackable. We'll run Ubuntu on this baby.

[Tesla Posted Jan 28th 2010 10:24PM]

Who cares about Hulu and flash when you have youtube? Most of the shows I watched were on Youtube anyway. Plays much better than the Buffering Hulu player. We made the 1st gen 4gb iphone work by jailbreaking and we will make do with this. Built in flash would've been more money putting it in a different tax bracket.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 28th 2010 10:50PM]

Saying it's basically a Cortex A9 is like saying the Snapdragon is only a Cortex A8, but we know that a Snapdragon will out-perform an OMAP 3430 at the same clock speed though they have the same core architecture.

[Fanfoot Posted Jan 29th 2010 12:46AM]

Of course its an ARM core. It was obvious right from the beginning it was going to be an ARM core. Only people who don't know anything about SOC development would have thought otherwise, that somehow Apple had hired a few guys and they'd developed an amazing new CPU in such a short time.

At the same time though, now because you were stupid doesn't mean you have to denegrate the engineers who developed this. They probably did some very interesting work, handing various busses, managing power, maybe there's even a nice h.264 decode accelerator in there for example. Some cool stuff. You don't have to be dicks about everything. Obviously the guys who worked on this, both from ARM itself, and from PA Semi, did some nice work.

You can't drool all over the Tegra and shit on this.

[etshea Posted Jan 29th 2010 11:50AM]

Apple did a lot of work on the ARM chips back in the 80's. If you look at ARM's website. There is bunch of companies that produce ARM chips. They have to be licensed. Cortex is not exclusive to the Tegra.

[ptoboley Posted Jan 29th 2010 7:39PM]

@etshea Actually it was the early 90's, but who's counting.