iPad: 1GHz PA Semi ARM, 10 hours battery life, up to 64GB Flash Storage

John Brownlee ()

iPad: 1GHz PA Semi ARM, 10 hours battery life, up to 64GB Flash Storage

And now some of the specifics of my particular iPad tablet beef have come out.

The chip is from PA Semi, an ARM-based CPU, as guessed. It’s called the A4, and it “screams” at 1GHz.

The iPad is 0.5 inches thin, weighs 1.5 pounds, with a 9.7-inch IPS, fully capcitive multitouch display.

“All the usual suspects: accelerometer, compass, speaker, mic, dock connector. And it’s got battery,” says Jobs.

And what a battery! Netbook style! 10 hours! A month of standby. Remarkable for a device so thin.

Come in flavors between 16 and 64GB of flash, SSD storage.

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Only connectivity that Jobs has mentioned so far is 802.11n WiFi. Let’s see if they unveil the 3G partners shortly.

[image via GDGT]

11 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Apple Tablet, News |

  • Mike

    Are you sure it’s an ARM processor, or are you just guessing? I hear PA Semi concentrates on PPC processors, which would make sense for Apple to go back to.

  • Steve

    PA Semi is an ARM shop. Apple is an ARM licensee.

    PA did some PPC for a bit but not long; they have a long history of ARM technology development.

  • Mike

    @Steve – cool, but none of that confirms whether the chip is actually an ARM chip, though it does make it seem a little more likely.

    Still, as for Apple being an ARM licensee, I think the fact that Apple *designed* the PPC processor with IBM and Motorola, and the mention that this is a custom chip which Apple helped design – is stronger support for the possibility that this is a PPC chip.

    Either way, we’re still guessing until Apple itself confirms what kind of chip it is.

  • pasemi-made-ppc

    PA Semi manufactured PPCs. They were part of the AIM Aliance with IBM and Motorola.

    “P.A. Semi concentrated on making powerful and power-efficient Power Architecture processors called PWRficient, based on the PA6T processor core. The PA6T was the first Power Architecture core to be designed from scratch outside the AIM alliance (i.e. not by IBM, Motorola/Freescale or Apple) in ten years. Texas Instruments was one of the investors in P.A. Semi and it is suggested that their fabrication plants will be used to manufacture the PWRficient processors.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

  • CPUman

    Of course its an ARM, reason, code compatibility with the existing iPhone OS.
    Likely its an ARM Cortex A8 architecture, which is the same ARM and frequency found in the current Qualcomm Snapdragon.

    Its definitely not a PPC and Apple had not part in the design of the PPC.

  • Mike

    @CPUman do your research, as I said before, Apple, IBM and Motorola collaborated on the PPC:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC

  • CPUman

    @Mike, I stand corrected regarding Apple’s part on the PPC.

    The A4 is definitely not PPC.

    I’m certain the Apple A4 core is ARM based.
    All previous iPhones used ARM processors (ARM 11 and ARM Cortex A8).
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphone

    If Apple was really ahead of the game they would have a dual core Cortex A8 or A9 in 40nm. Likely they are a year of so behind Qualcomm’s Snapdragon (meaning they have a 65nm A8), but I could be wrong, we’ll see.

  • Paul

    Compass? Don’t they mean GPS? What good does a compass do without GPS? Or was GPS dropped to save battery? Too bad, cause GPS would have made it into a GPS killer (goodbye Garmin)

  • bob

    PA semiconductor did design PPC before Apple bought them. But it doesn’t follow that they continued down that path. The founder, Dan Dobberpuhl was one of the forces behind the acquisition of an ARM license at Digital and the low power techniques that gave the StrongArm it’s outstanding power/performance characteristics. Switching between architectures is not hard for a hardware team. It’s an internal matter to Apple. Migrating an application portfolio across architectures is much more challenging and involves many third parties. It makes much more sense to redirect the hardware team and keep the IPOD software base.

  • Julian Skidmore

    It’s an ARM, as revealed by Warren East, CEO of ARM. Check out:

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

    Moreover, it’s not a tepid last generation A8, but a 1GHZ A9 with an ARM ‘Mali’ GPU.

    And that means… it’s great!

    -cheers from Julz @P

  • james a. foster

    how does the battery life relate to the amount of memory? What is the life of a 64G model? anyone know?