Ars: the iPad’s A4 CPU is nothing special
Over at Ars Technica, Jon Stokes ponders why a company as prone to chest-thumping as Apple has been so curiously mum about the iPad’s A4 processor and ultimately comes to an interesting conclusion: Apple hasn’t talked much about the A4 CPU because it’s not really anything special.
In fact, according to Stokes’ sources, Apple’s A4 appears to be nothing fancier than a single core ARM Cortex A8 CPU clocked at 1GHz coupled with a PowerVR SGX GPU. The iPad gets its performance gains largely from stripping away the I/O hardware from the jack-of-all-trades A8 that it doesn’t need.
The best point of the piece, though, is that Apple’s never really been about the hardware: they’ve been about the total experience. As Stokes points out:
[T]he iPad is actually a lot like the Mac. The Mac combines commodity hardware with great industrial design and a superior user experience. The iPad aims to do the same, but under a new compute paradigm that replaces the venerable keyboard-and-monitor combo with a slate form factor, and the decades-old WIMP-based UI (Windows Icons Menus Pointer) with multitouch.
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In other words, the iPad is no different than any other Apple product: a fusion of existing hardware, perfectly realized software and world-class design. Getting hung up on the CPU is beside the point.
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John 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 ![Read "Why You’ll Probably Never Own A Mac With An ARM Processor [Feature]" Read "Why You’ll Probably Never Own A Mac With An ARM Processor [Feature]"](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/macbookairarm-300x250.jpg)
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