A5: All Apple, Part Mystery

PabloSandoval48 submitted a fairly lengthy story running on the EE Times about the A5 processor that powers the iPad 2. The story talks a bit about the A4 and A5, the IP issues surrounding the chip, and more. The real question now is what comes next.

Comments

Awful article

[Anonymous Coward]

The authors of the article and the editor who approved it should be ashamed of themselves. Five pages saying exactly nothing.

Re:A lot of speculation, very little thinking

[UnknowingFool]

The battery is actually slightly bigger in terms of capacity. It is 25 kWh whereas the old one was 24.8 kWh. The battery appears much larger only because it is wider but it also is thinner than the old one. As for the A5, another thing Apple did is to make the cores variable speed. They run at a max of 1GHz but clock down depending on usage probably to conserve power.

Re:To be fair, here is link with ads

[TheRaven64]

Not so much. The two ARM cores are pretty easy to identify on the chip, as are some of the other components. The rest is... something. No one cares enough to work out exactly what. Oh, and the two ARM cores are well under 40% of the total die size. The GPU takes up a reasonable amount of space, and then there are controllers for the various peripherals (network, audio, USB and so on), interrupt controllers, and so on.