Apple's iPad A4 processor X-rayed to reveal three-layer design - Page 2

I'm not even sure what you are trying to say with this first sentence. As to the OS IPhone is more or less UNIX with a lot of the utility functions missing. Obviously Apple has gone in a different direction when they borrowed the core of Mac OS/X here but the fact remains you have a multitasking OS without a pageing system. That is no virtual memory, so real RAM is very important. More importantly iPhone OS is still growing in size and version 4.0 is due in very short order.

I'm not sure why you bring up the new processor as that has very little if anything to do with this issue. Apple could have used the current iPhones processor and the response would be the same. With out RAM a processor is pretty useless.

Validated? What year is this? Seriously the relationship between RAM and computer capability has been known for years. You question is seriously sounding like trolling.

In any event the easy question to ask here is this: have you used an iPhone? Apps are being hit with performance problems or failures all the time due to the lack of RAM. On iPad your RAM demands only go up due to the larger higher pixel count screen.

That is a good question! In a nut shell because it is feasable technology wise and would more than double RAM available to applications. Don't forget that a good portion of that initial 256MB will never be available to user apps. Some will go to the video function, some to the kernel and some to mandatory background processes. Right now developers are reporting less than 200MB of RAM actually available to programs. This is a step backwards not forwards.

Beyound that an additional 256MB makes apps possible that aren't currently without putting to much of a demand on the hardware. It should be enough to address regressive behaviour seen in many current iPhone apps. Finally more RAM makes life easier for developers thus leading to fewer bugs. Not too that the RAM issue only gets worst if multitasking becomes real. For that matter finding RAM to generate images for printing, if that becomes real, could be an issue for some programs. The list could become very long if you put thought into it.


Dave

Think about the screen size to start with. The video buffer has to be bigger right of the bat. The new programs often have more and bigger controls compared to their iPhone counterparts. Just taking the demands of the screen into account should be a big clue here that RAM is important on iPad.

This doesn't even address user apps where everything is bigger due again to the larger screen.

Why do people keep insisting Apple designed this chip? Their contribution is probably tiny, Just enough to allow them to stick their logo on it. It doesn't even have a © symbol on it.

I think the A4 is really Just a repackaged Samsung Hummingbird processor.

There is a rumour that Apple has just bought another ARM chip design company - Intrinsity.

Intrinsity apparently designed the Hummingbird for Samsung. The A4 is manufactured by Samsung.

The Hummingbird is the chip that will be powering Samsung's new smart phones, the i9000 S Galaxy and the S8500 Wave, except the Hummingbird in these phones actually has 512mb of RAM.

Perhaps Apple's contribution to the A4 was to ask Samsung to drop half the RAM from the Hummingbird so they could put their logo on it and pretend it was a custom designed processor.

And exactly how do you propose to accomplish that? Move your house to North Dakota? "Fibberglas" batting? I imagine there'll never be a contextual content checker to provide us with the necessary "insulation" from inappropriate word choices.

As an iPhone and now an iPad developer, could you elaborate? This is a new one for me.

Indeed.

Companies buy competitors products for that purpose all the time. There's certainly nothing illegal in taking it apart.

That's what patents are for; to prevent someone from duplicating your work, even though they know how it works.

Validated evidence? That's something that not needed. It's simply a matter of fitting all the required parts of a program and its resources into the RAM. The more programs running at once, and the larger they are, the more RAM is needed. If you read the articles written about this, you'll see the 128 is considered to be too low, and that phones that have tried with 128 are slow. 256 is considered to be much better, but tight.

It's very likely that the average iPad app will be larger than the average iPhone app. It's also likely that people would be more interested in this feature on the iPad more so than on the iPhone. That would be especially true if Apple allowed more than one app on the desktop at once. Then we have multiple windows to deal with as well. We don't know what, if anything Apple is going to do with multitasking beyond what they already have.

In addition, if we want to get more sophisticated programs such as photo editing apps and the like, more RAM is needed. A photo editing app needs a lot of RAM. If you've got several others running at the same time, you can run into memory limits, unless Apple has worked out a way to use virtual memory for overflow.

But not perhaps as good for unlimited multitasking.

Because RAM is easy to add. More wouldn't take up more room. It just costs a bit more, and is likely why Apple is sticking to 256 right now, assuming the reports are correct.

But RAM can slow multitasking. If not enough is present, then things will slow down.

That's the problem. It certainly IS enough, but 512 wouldn't be hard to put in and would open more possibilities for many apps, especially games.

I'm not saying "LOL IPAD HAZ LESS MEMORY THEN MY NEXUS APPLE SUXXXXX", nor that that'll kill it, but it would have been nicer for everyone if it DID have more memory.

What reports?

¿Que? Is that a rhetorical question, because i didn't say the iPad does use less, I just didn't know how much more it used until I ran some tests.

Anyway, after checking the stats immediately after 3 restarts I obtained the following mean average...

. . . . . . .iPad. . .3GS
. .Wired:. . 55MB. . 36MB
. Active:. . 26MB. . 25MB
Inactive:. . .8MB. . .8MB
. . Free:. .126MB. .146MB
. .Total:. .215MB. .215MB

I questioned it because, first of all, there has been an assumption that Apple would double the amount of RAM in the new iPhone, and so should have doubled it in the iPad.

More RAM is always better. Many times, years ago, my Mac would put a message on the screen when I was doing heavy editing, that I needed to close windows, or programs because I didn't have enough RAM for the System to accomplish its tasks. OS X has eliminated that concern. But if not enough RAM is onboard, programs do slow down, as the OS swaps between the HDD and RAM.

People here might remember why we're moving to 64 bits. Not because it's faster, because it isn't. It's because we can get more RAM.

I've got 16GB in my Mac Pro, and soon I will move to 32 GB because some editing with large images slows down because of the limit.

Look how Apple continually raises the limits on the amount of RAM their machines use. Even an iMac can now take 16GB RAM.

There's a lot of things an iPad can do, but RAM limitations may prevent some of it. If Apple thinks 256 MB is enough, then I hope they're correct.

Yes it does, but as my memory stats indicate there is no additional RAM to enable multitasking sufficiently without optimizing the OS to use the RAM more intelligently. Perhaps that is what they did or perhaps v4.0 won't have multitasking at all as it does seem to be only a niche of Apple's consumer base that even cares about it. It's certainly worth discussing, that's for sure.

Taking all bets onTthursday's preview.

Sadly typical for Apple. Give the lowest hardware spec they can get away with at a premium price. Then again with a 17.00 core processor 256mb of ram is expected.

You know, it would be easy for you to look this stuff up for yourself, but I'll give you some.

Read the entirety of the articles. Sometimes the sentence is buried inside.

http://www.tipb.com/2010/01/15/ram-d...-multitasking/

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/26/e...mostly-a-myth/

http://pocketnow.com/hardware-1/t-mo...-amount-of-ram

http://www.ipodnn.com/articles/10/03...face.concepts/

Most companies do that as well. Apple does seem to get more out of their hardware than other companies. Look at how poorly the Palm phones do with the same HW as the 3GS.

Well the Nexus One which is suppose to be the fastest smartphone right now has 512mb and I believe something like 576mb for the HD version. One the iPhone adds multi-tasking its going to be hard to get away with 256mb.

I wonder how the iPad will do if/when multi-tasking is added and someone is working on something like Keynote with several other applications open.

This is a key point, nobody is saying iPad will not work as it is now. It is just that more RAM would have opened up far more possibilities. Not to mention have a positive impact on Apples own apps.

Far nicer. More importantly it would put off the unit becoming obsolete to soon. To me the fear is the unit will become obsolete way to fast. Now people may say that happens to all computers and in a sense they would be right. The problem is most computers allow for RAM expansion when needed.

It isn't like the voice of inexperience is speaking here as I started out with Apple products on a Mac Plus, plus have had various other computers over the years. Everyone of them was limited in what it could do by the installed RAM. The expandable machines though had a much longer useful life. The point is iPhone is already demonstrating issues due to the lack of RAM, so either Apple isn't learning here or they simply have plans to compete with iPads at extremely low price points.



Dave

Somewhere in Apple's iPad Development & Design team:

Engineer 1: "Mmm. 256MB RAM should do the job"
Engineer 2: "NO, no. More, more we gotta have more RAM - 1GB at least"
E1: "Why?"
E2: "Well, all those games! Multitasking! You know".
E1: "Well, that would require more power to process all the extra data being moved around. And, err, we don't have multitasking for 3rd party apps anyway".
E2: "Yea, yea. But, we should though. How will people feel when they find their iPad is only 256MB?"
E1: "But we don't say how much RAM they contain on the product pages, only the data storage sizes"
E2: "Well we should, otherwise how can people do that comparison thing?"
E1: "More RAM will cost more, increasing the price and perhaps pricing out some customers. Then there's the effect on battery life too."
E2: "Well, only the ones that aren't serious. I mean who wouldn't want more RAM in their iPad to impress their mates who have less in theirs. And multitask all those apps - I need at least 4 or 5 running constantly"
E1: "I don't think you quite understand what we're trying to create here ..."

(Of course I can't imagine Apple being so foolish as to employ E2, but that's another matter!)

So the process goes:

My iPad is great, speedy, zippy, a joy to use and all those reviews seem to reckon so too.
How much RAM in it?
I don't know, why do you ask?
Just curious?
Hey guys, I've just found out that it's only got 256MB of RAM
Oh no! How could they? How could Apple have crippled it like that? Imagine how much better it would perform if it had 512MB? Or even 1GB? Then it would really scream - man they've shafted me. I'd never have bought it if I knew it had so little RAM, I mean that was a lot for a desktop maybe 10 years ago, but for an iPad? It's so embarrassing ...

The ram point is made clear by a comparison to the botched job that is the hp slate, with 1gb ram, an atom, and windows 7... one need not say more.


Dave, I think you are spot on here, apple is competing at extremely low prices and forcing everyone out of the competition. To me that was the smartest technological and marketing move of the ipad. When you get to force acer to admit that they are out of the game and hp to price their crapware $100 lower than you (apple) with a smaller screen and half the battery life. They 've put everyone on a very tight spot, because they followed this strategy: We 'll sell as low as we can without compromising key features such as display tec, battery tec, and overall performance, as well as taking advantage of the integrated os and chip design to maximise the effectiveness of the resources used and cut down on the cost of parts, and dominate the market from day 1. This is no apple tv, this is the real deal, a project rebooted so many times, and arriving just when both the apple ecosystem and the technology are just about ripe.

And delivering a staggering blow to pretty much every tech competitor, that I believe won't just be with the ipad, but with the extended halo effect it will have. The line up is now almost complete, full circle, since Jobs returned, and the competitors are wondering what hit them at the moment, but after they wake up from the hang over of the ipad they are going to suffer a lot more blows with the aforementioned halo effect it will have.

And I think it showcases the decades of wisdom and experience of Steve Jobs as a leader. It's like watching a masterful game of chess the way the ipad launch was set up, the newton is sacrificed, then itunes comes along, ipod, a phone that would make inroads to a lot of users, then an app store, an ecosystem of apps and a cloud service, and then the ipad. You have to admire the careful calculated steps and the build up to it, cause in business as in life it's much harder to restrain one self to careful, meticulous movements, than to go all in too soon. And these steps bear the indelible stamp of Steve.

First of all, we'll have to see whether the iPad does have 256. That may be wrong. I hope it's 512, but we'll see.

The Nexus One also has a much faster cpu, though the gpu sucks.

There are engineering tradeoffs no matter what. If Apple can pull this off with 256, that would be great. As I mentioned earlier, if they decide to go back and use virtual memory for this purpose, something they're not using with the iPhone devices, then the amount of RAM won't be as important. But I don't think that any phone OS uses virtual memory, though I could be wrong.

I just remembered that the PlayStation 3 only has 256 MB RAM.

OK. I perused the articles. Maybe I missed it, but could you point out where it stated that it costs a bit more and is likely why Apple is… as you contended.

I have to show you that 512 MB RAM costs more than 256 MB RAM? You haven't figured that out for yourself?

I'm speculating that price was an issue for Apple.

You suggesting I am too dumb to figure that out? Well I guess I wasn't as dumb as you thought.

You got called out and tried to pass off false references. I don't consider that too smart.

Actually to be brutally honest I'm impressed with the fact it's 256MB RAM because having seen Pages and Numbers and Keynote in operation that makes it even more stunning what can be done when programmers think about code optimisation.

Hopefully we can return to the good old days when limited hardware specs meant tidy code instead of the bloat we see today. Apple is definitely heading that way with their release of Snow Leopard.

Alm I the only one curious if apples CPU is stacked vertically cutting down on the path length between pieces. What once took xxx distance now takes x distance. Thus increasing speed?

I believe they are referring to the fact that with more RAM, you can fudge somewhat on the tightness of your code. In particular the memory management of your App.

Or it could just be me...

Geez. Is it a full moon somewhere? Because now you're just pissin' in the wind.

I suppose that is possible. For years Apple always promoted the idea that GHz wasn't such a big issue as their data pipelines were far shorter than the Intel and AMD CPUs.

Thanks for pointing that out to me. As English is not my first language I sometimes make those silly mistakes.

Yes that is a good portion of it. The less memory management that the programmer has to handle the fewer chances for bugs.

That is just in memory management. The other issues is that the developer may have to structure the program logic in ways that he would normally to either accomodate that memory management or to make his code space tighter.

No it is me too.

It is a question of what happens when a programmer has to take memory management steps he wouldn't have to if he had more memory. Not to mention is the performance hits that one sees due to the lack of memory which can often lead to other optimization efforts.

It is all about writing simple straight forward code vs trying to stuff more functionality into a code space than it can easily handle. Sure such programs can be wrtten but I submit that they take much longer to debug.

Dave

I didn't say you were dumb. You just said you were. You were expecting me to show you that 512 costs more than 256. Why I don't know.

What false references smart guy?

256 should be fine for simpler usage. It's when a number of programs are running together that more memory becomes necessary. 256 may be enough for full use of multitasking programs, but it's a tight squeeze.

The interesting thing here is that you are comparing with a 3GS, which as we all know has more software running at start up. It would be nice to see numbers for a modern Touch.

What is even more interesting is how the 3G version will work. I was actually thinking about getting a 3G version but if it has even less free RAM available I have to wonder if there is sense in that. I'm actually wondering if the 3G iPad will come with more RAM to deal with the defect. Beyound that how much room will exist for either unit with iPhone OS 4.0.

Some will say it is only 20MB but what is bothersome is that is 20 MB less than a 3GS. Plus it is a good fraction of memory available to user apps.

In any event the issue here that sets me off is that Apple was so damn sneaky here. If one knew what they where buying it would be one thing but when Apple went out of it's way to hide this very important fact it really sucks.

Now it is important for people to realize that I don't think this will keep developers as a whole away from the device. I'm sure however that some are already reconsidering this rev of the device.




Dave

Ars posted its looong review of the device.

One thing they noted for the purpose of gaming, which, so far they found to be great is this:

He didn't ask you to show him that, "512 costs more than 256."

He questioned your claim that the extra costs to double the amount of RAM from 256 to 512 was the reason why Apple used the lower amount. And asked you to show the reports that proved it.

The proof is in the pudding. By all reports, the iPad is very, very fast in its present form, so I'm not worried about it.

Of course, I fully expect that next year, iPad v 2.0 will have a faster processor and probably more RAM. No big deal - I'll buy one and give the v 1.0 to my daughter.

Of course, if someone wants to wait for a 512 MB version, they're free to do that, although I've never understood that logic. When the 512 MB version comes out, why don't you wait for the 1 GB version. Then, you should probably wait for the 2 GB version -- and so on. My view is simple - if it meets my needs and budget today, I'll buy it, regardless of whether a newer version will come out some day. The only exception would be something where there's clearly an upgrade just around the corner (MacBook Pro, for example).

Since it will be 3G for data only I would expect it to use less RAM than the 3GS for the cellular processes, but it is troubling for those expecting backgrounding in v4.0. Maybe for that extra $130 you also get 512MB RAM, but I doubt it.

Maybe Apple has found a way to lessen the impact of backgrounding to a point that 256MB is sufficient. I think that is the only option if that is to come to this iPad.



Melgross' comments have nothing to with inflated desires or some weird logic that always ends in "I wish it had x*2 RAM" where x = the current RAM in MB. The concern is a valid.

if you are going to run background apps with the suspected v4.0 then 256MB simply won't cut it with the amount of extra video RAM needed using typical backgrounding resources.