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A Close Look At Apple's A4 Chip
PabloSandoval48 writes "Apple's A4 processor is heavily influenced by Apple's long-established relationship with Samsung and represents an evolution rather than a revolution in circuit design. A team of experts takes a look at the evidence on A4 in an attempt to determine its origins and the influence of recent Apple acquisitions in the area of chip design."
A team of experts takes a look at the evidence on A4 in an attempt to determine its origins and the influence of recent Apple acquisitions in the area of chip design."
The team of experts concludes the A4 was designed by Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Revolver.
I hear that the new A4 chip will allow the iPad to grow to 210 × 297 mm!
I don't see what's so interesting here. It's a standard, general-purpose, consumer-grade embedded processor. There are billions of these around in all sorts of devices.
Is this one of those things that people get excited about just because it's from Apple, but is otherwise totally unremarkable?
I think it is just because it is Apple. For some reason, the thought of Apple being involved in processor design makes these people jizz in their pants.
Did you read the actual article? Do you know anything about how the ARM architecture works?
Its sort of a "plug and play" architecture-- they license out the core design, the Cortex A8, but that design isn't set in stone. It includes options and modules that you can decide what to include or not, and there's all kinds of ways you can choose to optimize it and modify it to suit your needs.
Some people take this design and market their own customized version of the architecture for various purposes -- Nvidia's Tegra is one such. Its an ARM chip, but not all ARM chips are created equal (and it depends greatly on the purpose one customized an ARM chip for).
The A4 isn't some entirely new sort of chip-- its not as custom as Quallcomm's Snapdragon-- but its also not the same as any other chip on the market. They left some things out. They added some things in(or, more, changed some things). They tweaked its design to suit their purposes. Its not a general-purpose chip, needed for multiple vendors and different device types, so they left off some things to optimize it.
Therefore... its not off-the-shelf. You can't buy one. If you're an ARM-licensee, you could make one if you really wanted if you peered close enough and figured out which modules all the various parts on the die are.
That sounds like the basis for a religious text.