Ever so gently, we're starting to
peel away the layers of mystery surrounding the A4 system-on-chip that powers Apple's fancy new slate device.
iFixit, helped by reverse engineering firm
Chipworks, have gone to the trouble of both dissecting
and X-raying the iPad's central processing hub in their quest to lift the veil of ignorance. Their findings confirmed that the A4 is built using a "package on package" method, meaning that the 256MB of Samsung-provided SDRAM is stacked immediately atop the CPU, which is noted as being reductive to both latency and energy use. With a single core processor inside, the
iFixit team concluded the iPad had to be running on
a Cortex A8 -- which is very much the
likeliest choice at this point -- but their assertion that it
couldn't be a
Cortex A9 MPCore inside is inaccurate, as those chips also come in single-core options. Either way, it'll be interesting to see how it stacks up against
Samsung's Hummingbird chip, which was designed by Intrinsity, the same company Apple is being rumored to have
recently acquired. Finally, the visual inspection of the iPad's mobo puts a model number to the already known
PowerVR GPU, narrowing it down to the SGX 535, while also naming and picturing a number of other exciting components, such as the always popular capacitive touchscreen controller. Hit the source link below for all the lurid images.
posted April 6th 2010 5:04AM
@jasonfreeman27 I understand that you don't just came up with these numbers, the study can be found on Adobe's website. I can't say that the lack Flash poses absolutely no problems, but I really think that the problem it poses can be not that big on average (some people would stream flash videos and play flash games all day, while others will read articles and the only flash they will see will be ads).
My problem with those numbers is that includes ads. I mean, good for Adobe if they have this kind of penetration, but those numbers mean nothing to me. That is all.
Now each of us can decide how much he will miss Flash and act accordingly.
@jasonfreeman27
True but Engadget likes to ride the hyperbole and the lack of Flash really isn't that much of a problem. We know that the major sites are switching to deliver content to the iPhone/iPad so it really isn't worth getting hung up on this subject. And, as I noted, the lack of Flash has some fringe benefits that Engadget does not pick up (i.e. pages load faster, battery lasts longer) so it really does depend on what you NEED. For example, if you live on Hulu then the iPad is not for you (just yet). If, for example, live in the UK and the BBC iPlayer is already compatible with the iPhone/iPad (and has been for years) so the lack of Flash really isn't important to me.
Ultimately, I believe that the convenience of the device outweighs the current "lack of Flash pain" and that content providers will increasingly offer non-Flash alternatives.
yes that might include but they also include everything else and trust me i dont play flash game or social networking most of time i read and download and play proper games
at the end of the you should be able to go to sites you want not matter what the format and this item does not allow it you can say all day long thats it great and we dont need flash but its untrue you are kidding yourselfs. i dont care what format is used as long as i can go to nearly all websites
@jasonfreeman27 Actually, your wrong. Gizmodo is a preview of the top 10-15 sites on the iPad, they looked fine. Flash usage is overrated (along with Flash).
@jasonfreeman27
In fairness, in the early noughties you could have argued the same with Internet Exploder given the preponderance for sites that required you to be using IE 6. However, Firefox came along and showed how things could be done better and the number of people using the application eventually forced web sites to adopt open standards. I don't see much of a difference between sites locked to IE and those locked to Flash. Much like then, I quite believe that it will all be OK and that Flash is not something that is necessary.
However, as I have already said, whether you need Flash is something that you can decide and you can base your purchasing decision on. For myself it is not something that is necessary and I have more benefits without than I do costs.
@omegathirteen its engadget who wrote things i wrote about flash and as for igizmondo they pretty much owned by apples there can not further up is arse
@kelmon yes i agree that html5 or something better will take over from flash bit is crap and buggy but you till need at moment in time it might have few of companys turning to html5 but at this rate it will be a really long time
@jasonfreeman27
Why do I *need* Flash today? I don't *need* Flash today, I didn't *need* it yesterday and I am very sure that I won't *need* it tomorrow either. Frankly, we also don't *need* HTML5 in order to get rid of Flash, either. Look again to the BBC iPlayer service. That was only available to Windows users originally via Media Player, then was extended to Mac and Linux users via Flash, and then was extended to iPhone users via plain ol' h.264 streaming. This was before HTML5 arrived.
As I have stated before, your own requirements may vary but assuming that Flash is a necessity is very, very wrong. At most I consider its support to be a convenience but given that a heck of a lot of Flash content is basically advertisements, am I really missing out on much?
It is perhaps also worth pointing out that when it comes to online video streaming, most of the content is already encoded in h.264 which is then played back via Flash. Given this it is not difficult for content providers to provide native h.264 video streams in addition to Flash because they do not need to re-encode the content or store it again. There are, of course, concerns about piracy but I think that we all know how trivially easy it is to download Flash video for offline playback. Besides, the BBC doesn't seem to have had any issues so I can't see why this would be a problem for anyone else.
No one else thought space pistol?
Actually, their assertion that it couldn't be the Cortex-A9 MPCore is correct, considering that the "MPCore" part refers to it being a multi-core version. The Cortex-A9 does have a single-core version, but you wouldn't call that the MPCore.
That seem like a lot of work to go through, just to figure out what's going on under the hood. Maybe I'm missing the point. Unless... they're planning on reverse engineering the thing for jail breaking or making it grow a camera!?
i would just like to point out that the Mars Phoenix Robot only has 128 MB of RAM......and no, that does not mean that your windows based tablet or netbook is better.
@ssgadget No, but we know exactly what the Snapdragon and i3/i5/i7 are. With this, Apple has told absolutely nothing about it. This is in fact the one thing I'm curious about with regards to the iPad.