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.
