Maybe the “A” in “A4” Stands for “ARM”?

By  |  Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 11:27 am

I’m not a chip geek, so I can’t really judge this story. And I persist in thinking that it’s too soon to judge the Apple A4 chipY inside the iPad, period. But the article I’m linking to says the A4 is mostly existing technology from venerable chip designer ARM, not innovative new stuff from Apple. (It also ends with some angry ranting which doesn’t do much to increase its credibility–but like I say, I’m not in a position to judge…)

 
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  1. Mike Cerm Says:
    January 28th, 2010 at 12:13 pm

    The A4 is, without a doubt, an ARM-based chip. Just like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Nvidia’s Tegra2, it’s an SoC built around a Cortex A9 multi-core CPU.

  2. Jemuel Griffith Says:
    January 28th, 2010 at 12:46 pm

    That maybe true but there is a reason that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Nvidia’s Tegra 2 have been released by 2 different companies and offer design differences that are useful for different situations. These companies make proprietary modifications to the generic ARM license. It what make Snapdragon, Snapdragon and Tegra, Tegra and now what makes Apple’s “custom silicon” well custom. That’s why even though Intel and AMD make the same x86 processor they are different enough to give Intel’s stuff better performance but similar enough to run the same code as AMD.

  3. Bouke Timbermont Says:
    January 28th, 2010 at 4:14 pm

    The chip is based on the ARM Cortex A9 design, a quad core chip capable of 1,3Ghz clockspeed. Apple clocked it lower due to heat issues and battery life.
    The A4 also contains a GPU.

    source: http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/1/27/apple-a4-soc-unveiled—its-an-arm-cpu-and-the-gpu!.aspx

    The A stands for Arm or Apple I think… the real question I have though is whether Apple is going to keep using in-house built chips, and to what extend?

  4. Jemuel Griffith Says:
    January 28th, 2010 at 4:23 pm

    Lol its amazing how much people “know” about apple’s custom chip even though nobody out side of apple really knows besides the fab the produced it. And of course they are going to bring it or a version of it to the iPhone, iPod and dear i say AppleTV. Why spend all this money to produce it to use in one product