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.
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.



John Brownlee is Cult of Mac's Deputy Editor. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his girlfriend and two parakeets. You can follow him 