There’s not much secret left in the sauce for the iPad’s A4 chip – it’s a faster, customised version of the chip in the iPhone 3GS. But the recipe probably comes from a tiny chip design firm Intrinsity.
The informed speculation is that Intrinsity’s custom ARM chip, Hummingbird, is in fact the basis for the A4 inside of the iPad. The name Intrinsity might sound familiar, since it was rumoured, but not confirmed, Apple had acquired the ARM chip design firm, which specialised in seriously speeding up ARM chips without horribly pillaging battery life.
Well, now Apple’s confirmed to NYT that it’s true, Intrinsity has been bought by Apple. So the obvious expectation is to keep seeing faster, stronger, custom ARM chips inside of Apple products – like the next iPhone – though what’ll be interesting is what they’ll be cooking up for Apple in the next couple of years. [NYT]
dam
Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 9:29 AMIntrinsity was also working on a custom design of Powerpc.
When I see how much faster my Ipad is compare to the Iphone, I have big doubt that A4 is a ARM.Could be Powerpc with ARM emulation, that would explain the move from Apple to force developer to use Xcode, Apple could remove the emulation layer and increase the speed overnight.
for the record my Ipad is 3 to 10 time faster than my laptop as searching a word withing a 1,300 pages PDF.There is something fishy to be that fast.
Sam
Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 12:04 PMMore batteries = more power to run to the chip = fast searches?