Slashdot Mirror
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.
The real question now is what comes next.
Here's a hint: It will be faster, and it will probably be called 'A6'. Just a guess.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The A6 Quattro?
Best Slashdot Co
The authors of the article and the editor who approved it should be ashamed of themselves. Five pages saying exactly nothing.
"The A[3+n] processor will be included in Apple iPad [n], which will be released in [2009+n]."
I just saved you the trouble of thinking
It's not the advertisements that tend to make people link to the print version, it's when they spread the article out over several pages. I don't mind advertisements at all, but I hate the online equivalent of turning to several different newspaper pages to finish a single article.
I might side with you if there were any content. The article consisted of some micrographs and a lot of "duh" speculation. I came away with very little new information. It took them a huge block of text to tell me that they don't know what 60% of the chip does.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
In about 2 years a new line of Desktops and laptops will be announced that used the new A10 processor, this processor will be used to get rid of all those ooky older intel based devices by having the new OS not compatible with it. Thus purging the world of the old product forcibly. Just like how those disgusting old G5 quad core towers still linger about now...
Using old hardware makes Jobs angry.... you wont like him when he's angry....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's merely a well planted Apple advertisement. A5 is SO powerful, so amazing, that even if you're not impressed with iPad 2, you'd be silly to actually consider an alternative instead of waiting for A6.
We've been seeing a lot of this stuff, lately. I wonder why Apple's so worried that their zombie masses will snap out of it.
There was however one recent article suggesting Apple implemented hardware video accelerators in the A4.
The comment seemed almost too easy in light of the above discussion. If this is in fact true one might question whether this is somehow associated with Apple's stance on Flash for its iOS devices. However, such an accelerator would have been one of the digital blocks. Does this imply it was also present on the S5PC110?
Yes, Samsung do have hardware video accelerators in their hummingbird processor. It supports mpeg4, H.264, H.263, Sorenson codec, DivX HD/ XviD, VC-1 and the video formats 3GP (MPEG-4), WMV (Advanced Systems Format), AVI (divx), MKV and FLV.
A6? you cant get rock hard abs in 6 minutes. it's 7 minute abs.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I've been a /. reader for over 8 years now and have noticed the change in the type of story discussed here. I keep seeing people saying things like "Why are we talking about FB - this is suppsed to be a techie site and we should discuss techie things". I tend to find myself agreeing with them most of the time.
Then a story like this comes along - which should be "manna from heaven" for Nerds and Geeks and I try to read TFA - only to find myself yawning and giving up coz it's dry, tedious and badly written.
I can't even win in an argument with myself anymore - must be a sign that I'm getting old.
Or we will see site operators that do not fluff up a 1 paragraph story to 5 pages then spread those 5 pages out to present you with ads 5 times,
Fuck the operator that does that. I hope their sites fail. That way the cream can rise to the top and the shit heads can starve.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I don't see Apple releasing an iPad 3 just 8 months after releasing the iPad 2. They might release an iPad 2 with more storage in time for the holidays as this would require changing one chip on the board, but not a whole new product. At the moment Apple and their suppliers seem to have enough problems manufacturing enough iPad 2s much less starting a whole new line.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Foxconn doesn't make parts for Apple.
No, Foxconn makes parts for A LOT of technology companies, not just Apple, and they also do some assembly of devices as well.
I doubt you'll find a motherboard made that doesn't have Foxconn components on it like the back panel ports for instance are almost certainly Foxconn components regardless of who assembled your computer, yourself or Dell.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager