If you like staring at silicon without its clothes on, you’ll love this: Chipworks has done a teardown of the iPad 2’s new A5 processor.
It’s a technical read, and frankly, I’m not Cylon enough to understand most of it. The most interesting detail for us laypeople is that it’s actually pretty honking huge: at 120mm, it’s actually more than twice the size of the A4’s 53mm CPU, allowing Apple to cram in more cores, transistors and a bigger GPU for more oomph all around.
According to Chipworks, the SoC is still pretty much off-the-shelf. It’s manufactured by Samsung, despite Apple’s rumored partnership with TSMC to build iPad 2 chips, so it doesn’t look like Apple’s given Sammy the boot just yet for daring to release their own tablet.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
8 responses to “A5 Teardown Reveals Chip Almost Twice The Size Of The A4”
Does this mean that the iPhone 5 will have a lesser version of the A5 chip or something?
I always thought the iPad should have a more powerful processor than the iPhone
not only do they say “ipad 2” they say faster. Sadly their A5 processor is just a copy written version of I7.
The i7 processor? You’re kidding, right?
I would recommend you link to Anandtech for technical testing and insights. Stick to benefits and what all that spec stuff means to buyers. They’ll likely get more out of it.
The bigger footprint is significant is packaging a la iPhone5 references. Same for Cameras.
A5 is not a generic copy of an Arm processor … It has been optimized and the GPU is phenomenal.