Inside the iPad: Apple's A4 processor - Page 2

That's a pretty lame attempt at creating FUD! You can't come up with anything better? Seriously!

Yikes, what a response!

Can't respond to you all, so I guess I should say I'm sure Apple isn't out to commit business suicide by locking down it's computers.

A lot of the reasons to create the iPad is for media consumption, which the content providers do like a certain level of control over, thus the mention of processor based DRM schemes in the A4 used in the iPad.

This way one can have the best of both, a open computer with a lot of control and a closed device that can play a lot of content.

That's likely the plan, I'm just not up for a lot of change anymore, retired baby boomer and all.

What do you mean? He got at least 10 people to bite. I'd say that it met his needs very well indeed. You new here?

Linux runs very nicely on ARM.

When Acorn Computers designed the original ARM processors (ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machines) back in the late 80s and early 90s they were for their own line of desktop computers (running their own custom OS - RISC OS). Things have moved on since then, but it has heritage. Only when ARM was spun out of Acorn as a separate company (with Acorn, Apple and VLSI as shareholders) did it go down the amazingly successful path of developing the architecture for the embedded appliance market - initially for Apple's Newton, which used the ARM610. The same processor was also in Acorn's Desktop RiscPC 600.

sfocal - I do get the point you are trying to make, but your choice of wording is a bit misleading.

The iPad IS a computer - in the literal sense: Given the right program, like any computer, it is capable of computing anything that is theoretically computable (given also sufficient time and storage space). At its heart is the A4 which logically is no different from a high-end Intel processor. (Yes, I know that the instructions set is different, that is not the usage of logically intended here.)

I believe your point, with which I agree completely, is that it is not designed to be equivalent to a desktop/laptop computer. It is designed to be exactly what it is - the iPad - a very portable relatively low-powered (compared to say an MBP) device for doing well all the things that it does do well, but leaving the "heavy lifting" of content creation and other compute intensive tasks to its stronger, more appropriate brethren.

Regards!

After spending 20 yrs in the Semi Industry it's not about Speed or Size but power drain. Just like the PC world over-clocks their PC's to get more speed but at the cost of excessive power drain and huge heat load. Apple could have designed those A4 chips for say 1.2Ghz and 3.5mW power drain where the power drain was the goal. So in wafer test all chips meeting the 3.5mW spec and at least 1Ghz are accepted for packaging (at this time) the balance could be graded to a lower operating speed and set aside for later use in say an iPhone, Apple TV. or Airport Express.
It took us close to 3 years to get 80% yields on multifunction watch chips back in the early 80's. Hopefully technology has advanced sufficiently in the past 15 years that the time from first working silicon to 75-80% yields has gone from years to months. Oh yes, size does matter in the long run, by reducing geometries power consumption decreases and speed increases. So once you get your design bugs resolved you can then move to doing a die shrink. This can be observed with generations of Intel processors each generation typically using smaller geometries.

Really well done, well written article. Bravo!!

BTW - Does anyone know if it is possible to cut open a CPU and see what the logic design is?

But they will never admit it. The iPad is an appliance. Like a toaster. Or a waffle iron. Maybe a curling iron?





Nobody ever worries about how the guts of their electric blender works. It is just magic.

I'm still in the industry! You'd be stunned how quickly they get to >80% yields these days. Back when I started 15 years ago it was as you said, 3 years + to get there, now it's under six months.

Pure evil? Maybe not pure. I mean wanting to control every aspect of everything you can get your hands on so as to increase your own wealth stems from greed, which is an evil characteristic, but does it make someone pure evil?

Meh

I agree that all the hubbub about Apple abandoning the Mac for the new touch devices is a little silly, but amazingly, I've heard this fear from credible pundits like Leo Laporte. The problem with that argument can be summarized bu the following:

Criticism: The Macbooks are late because Apple doesn't care about them anymore.
Answer: The Macbooks are late because something held up the production. And it could be anything frankly. Lastly, the machine could be ready now but Apple didn't want to step on their own story with the iPad launch tomorrow. Once the date pushed out toward iPad launch time, any new anything from Apple was going to have to wait.

Criticism: The A4 will replace Intel.
Answer: Now this is laughable. The Intel product suite does what it does VERY WELL. The ARM product suite does what it does VERY WELL. They don't really play in each other's sandboxes. Intel is trying to get more Atom traction but the main market for that is netbooks since they want to run Windows. Anything in the smartphone or slate market is pretty much ARM right now. After this weekend, Apple will have sold more slates than anyone else several times over. And Macbooks will still fly out the door running Mac software as always. Relax.

Criticism: Half of Apple's revenue comes from iPhone/iPod Touch right now so they will want to concentrate there and not the Mac.
Answer: The Mac products, especially the laptops are a growing business and not by small numbers. The year-over-year growth percentage remains in the double-digits. OS X continues to be the common denominator with most of Apple's products which allows increased revenues due to product commonality. Also, many of the advances in Apple design are still happening first on the Mac. That Unibody Macbook Pro case is the father of the iPad case (the Macbook Air is the grandfather).

Huh? Qualcomm's Snapdragon process is Cortex-A8 based and nVidia's Tegra chip is based on an even older ARM11 core. Tegra 2 will be based on an A9 core but it hasn't appeared in any devices yet. There's currently no production chips based on the new A9 design yet, though engineering samples are available.

Even you're going to write a long piece on embedded chips, at least get the basic facts right.

Guess I didn't realize that the Tea Party movement had turned its attention to the Mac.

Tablets: Just How Nazi Germany Started.

Agreed. Expanding on your third topic, if anything with the iPod it has expanded the Macs market share. More people were exposed to the Macs when the iPod sales skyrocketed. Revenues from the iPod and iPhone have allowed Apple to work more on their iMacs, MBP and MacPros and need I say the iPad.

Seriously; when has Apple EVER saud they where dropping X86 hardware on the Mac? Posting such crap doesn't paint a pretty picture of your self.


As fast as A4 is rumored to be, it still isn't a competitive desktop or laptop processor.

the new MBPs may be radical but it won't be because of an ARM chip. Well at least an ARM chip as the main processor. There are more important things for you to worry about.



Dave

That is a great point. When Apple ditched PowerPC to goto Intel it was entirely down to them picking the best processor for the job. A4 seems to be exactly the same case for iPad - let's face it, almost everyone uses ARM devices for mobile devices and had Apple not designed this themselves but had instead bought an ARM based device designed by, I don't know, Samsung, nobody would be batting an eyelid.

Intel remain king of the desktop and laptop - it's hard to see why Apple would want to move away from that.

Apropos . . . here's something interesting:

http://gizmodo.com/5506692/ipad-is-the-future

Why Apples iPad will kill todays computers
Friday, April 02, 2010

"Normal people don't like today's computers. Most loathe them because they can't fully understand their absurd complexity and arcane conventions," Jesus Diaz writes for Gizmodo. "That's why the iPad will kill today's computers, just like the latter killed computers running with punchcards and command lines."

"Of course, the iPadthe actual product that millions will buy in the coming monthswon't replace all computers. The entire world is not going to run just on tablets, just like the world doesn't run only on smartphones and personal computers now," Diaz writes. "But Steve Jobs' Next Big Thing is the first computer that requires no training whatsoever, one that is truly accessible and useful for everyone. Just like the iPhone changed the idea of what a phone should be without anyone truly realizing it, Apple's new computer will completely and permanently change our idea of what a computer is and how it should behave."

Diaz writes, "The perception change will be so deep that it will kill Mac OS X, Windows and Linux as we know them today. At one point during this decade, you will no longer have a billion folders and file icons floating in a virtual desktop. There will be no more baffling setup screens. No more shortcuts to work around limitations and old conventions. These frustrating barriersbuilt during decades of evolutionare what make normal people hate computers. These barriers have now been obliterated, first by the iPhone and now by the iPad. Everyone will be using computers similar to the iPad. Not in terms of hardware, form factor, and specs. But on its philosophy."

Regarding the article...Yes and No- The digital world has become to graduated for anything so utopian, but on the whole...I think most computer users agree it would be nice if things were less complicated. Apple does this very well.

On the flip side, there are too many users today that rely upon fairly complex computer programs and knowledge. That is never going to go away, in fact quite the opposite. There is always going to be a huge market for the power user, gamer, programmer.

??? Apple has NEVER used Intel processors in their iPhone, iPod Touch, iPod, iPad only in their desktops.

There's no way Apple would use ARMs in their desktop and laptop products because they are too under powered.

That being said there's nothing to stop Apple building their own Intel based processors and showing the computing world how it should be done. Apple would simply only need to create its own drivers for their own chipsets which is does in BootCamp anyway so backwards compatibility isn't really san issue.

I don't think the point was that everyone will drop their powerfull computers for the iPad. The point, as I read it, was that once people get used to the streamlined iPad way of doing things they will not want to go back to conventional OSs with their old-style file systems and such. They will instead clamor for more powerful iPad-like systems and eventually people will be running Photoshop and other "pro" apps on "power user" capable iPad-like devices.

It is interesting to think of such things, but I think it is a little early to draw these conclusions. I mean, give people a few days at least to try the iPad before declaring it The Future Over All Others

So every one will still be using computers, they will just be somewhat different. WOW what a prescient and profound idea! Earth shattering.

His own last sentence contradicts his headline. He said absolutely nothing.

I really do not LIKE getting sarcastic. But....

Presently Apple does not have the capability to manufacture their own chips. PA Semi Conductor was a design company. Apple could team with AMD to design and produce "Intel" based processor, but watch out for patents. But why would Apple want to leave Intel?

Jailbreaking is a result of user dissatisfaction, not the other way around.

AI had a great discussion about jail breaking the iPad @http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=108097

Or maybe it is a surprise about people, that is the huge number of people buying this thing with no idea how much RAM the device has. That perplexes me to no end.

In the context of this A4 thread I think it is more of an issue than the tight reign on information about the A4. As a techie I'm very interested in the A4 chip and really want to know what makes the iPad tick but that is me and isn't as likely to be important to the average user. RAM on the otherhand should be an issue.

In any event this thread is kinda a waste of time. We will either see the details real sone or we might never. Considering product debut is hours away the article here is really a waste.


Dave

It's fast, that's all the average user cares about, or needs to know.

My wife has no idea what RAM is. Neither does my mother. Or my brother.

They'll all use the iPad if it's simple though.

If you think Jobs is solely in it "for the money" you haven't been paying attention much. Products like the iPad don't come from companies who are focused on profit first- things like Windows tablet PC's do. The iPad, despite the launch hype, is quite a risk. If you use it for more than 10 minutes it's obviously a labor of love. Just look at the comments about it's internal construction from the iFixIt guys. I doubt any other company would have tried it - indeed, no one else has tried to make a new platform like it before. Plenty will be willing to now follow in apple's wake, however. The days are counting down until the Zune tablet announcement

What perplexes me is why anyone other than a programmer would care. I don't know how much RAM is in my microwave or car's ECU, and I don't care. Nor do I care how much RAM is in my iPad. It either works or it doesn't. So far it has exceeded my wildest expectations.

This is especially true for a new device like the iPad.
With a Mac or a Windows computer, we all have experience with not having sufficient RAM and have seen performance boosts when such defficiencies are fixed by adding more RAM. However, with the iPad, we just assume more RAM will speed things up (especially because by computer standards 256 MB seems rediculously low) but as of yet, there is little to no real evidence of this.
People who are complaining about this now are doing so on a purely speculative basis.

OTOH, I am likely to be a second gen adopter, and I would be pleased to buy one with more RAM!

The company wants to move into that space:

http://www.greenm3.com/2009/09/arm-p...e-designs.html

iPhone and iPad are running OS X, just with a different UI layer (Cocoa Touch vs Aqua/Cocoa).


The benefit is huge if the above link is correct. Apple have the IP to push CPUs beyond waiting on Intel and their politics with GPU manufacturers, even though they haven't built the CPU yet, which comes from Samsung. Plus they'd have a common architecture with their mobile devices.

A performance-per-watt advantage of 5-8 times is surely enough to warrant consideration of switching when that's the reason they jumped to Intel.

Certainly some optimizations on the x86 chips can be reused sticking with Intel but they can bundle 5-8x the power in the same package to boost every app, not just optimized ones.

The desktop/laptop model is still tricky because of end users having to get new binaries all over again but devices like the ATV and even the XServe could go to ARM for ultra-low power usage. Most servers would run better with huge amounts of lower clocked chips than fewer fast ones - obviously depends on tasks run and more of both clock and cores is good.

Servers don't have many apps to run like a desktop/laptop, same with the ATV.


A4 is based on the Cortex A8 and wouldn't be a reference for a desktop/server chip - its been chosen for its purpose. The A9 supports multiple cores (tested up to 8) at speeds of 2GHz. ARM CPUs have also been used with NVidia GPUs in the Tegra platform:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_tegra_apx_us.html

It's far from the desktop/laptop models but supports 1080p output. NVidia would have to make a new model fit for purpose, possibly after an Apple purchase or whatever.

There's absolutely no reason to consider any possibility of Apple switching to ARM soon as people have said but you can't tell what will happen in the long term. Apple ship just over 10 million Macs a year now and with an install base of 70 million iPods/iPhones, there's a very real possibility that there are more people in the world who own an ARM-based Apple product than an x86 one, especially considering there are a lot of PPCs out there still.

So consider if ARM have 5x better performance per watt now than Intel and say 3 years down the line, they produce 16-32 core 2-3GHz ARM Cortex A10 or A11, what difference would it make if it had to emulate a few things here and there? We had to do it for the x86 transition via binary translation on slower hardware.

The only legacy binary apps you get that are difficult to port are the Adobe Suite, Microsoft Suite, some games and Windows. I doubt Apple care much about Windows usage, Adobe and MS would just have to port the suites over and Apple's dev tools would offer an easy path to target ARM. Apple could use ARM as a co-processor.

I can believe the iPad could be the start of rethinking the computer in anticipation of becoming its replacement. More people dislike computers than their sales would have us believe and they do have barriers. There needs to be a bridge though. The simplicity can't hold back functionality and currently the iPad does. OS X is far simpler than Windows/Linux yet just as powerful. Rather than diverge, I think OS X and iPhone OS will converge to reach the best of both. They may never meet exactly due to the UI and usage differences though.

There was a day we thought Apple would never switch from IBM after using them for 19 years and they did. Didn't see a unix system coming after using the old Mac system for 16 years but here we are. Apple have been using Intel for a grand total of 5 years now and we just can't say for certain that they will continue to in say 5, 10, 15 years from now. We might all be running an OS that is architecture agnostic, we might all be running our lives from our phones. I really think the latter is going to happen one day - mobile is the future of everything.