Apple confirms that the iPad uses the same type of GPU as the iPhone and iPod Touch

Ladies, gentlemen, please stifle the gasps and shrieks of surprise that the following announcement may well startle out of you. I recommend pushing your first into your mouth until your lips are elastically wrapped around your wrist.

Ready? Good. Prepare for a shock. According to Apple’s latest iPad SDK Beta 3 documantation, the iPad uses Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX Graphics Hardware for its GPU, just like the iPhone and iPod Touch.

I can see by your expressions that you didn’t find his revelation quite as heart-stopping as I thought you might. A steely nerved bunch, I see.

I suppose you’re right, though: iPhone and iPod Touch Apps have been confirmed as being fully backwards compatible with the iPad, despite the latter device’s significantly larger touchscreen display. That implies similar guts. It was probably to be taken as read that Apple, an investor in Imagination Technologies, wasn’t going to go too far afield of the iPhone’s architectural pairing of an ARM-based CPU and a PowerVR SGX GPU.

So not, perhaps, a revelation at all, but this should at least comfort existing app developers, who now know for certain they are working mostly with hardware elements they are familiar with. Even so, Apple warns: “[B]ecause the processor, memory architecture, and screen dimensions are different for iPad, you should always test your code on an iPad device before shipping to ensure performance meets your requirements.”

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[via MacRumors]

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