If you’re still banking on Apple releasing the iPad 3 this October, this might disappoint you: there’s just no chance that an A6 SoC will be ready this year. In fact, if there’s going to be a quad-core chip at the heart of the iPad 3 at all, we might be looking at an iPhone 5 sized delay between tablet generations by the time the next iPad comes around.
According to the Taiwan Economic News, the A6 CPU just won’t be ready until the second quarter of 2012 at the earliest.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, or TSMC, is the company allegedly behind the A6, but the latest report suggests that trial production is only now getting underway.
The A6 will reportedly boast TSMC’s new 28-nanometer process, along with 3D stacking technologies that will vastly improve performance in the iPad 3 without significantly increasing power draw.
This 3D stacking technology is theoretically enough to allow Apple to make an ARM processor powerful enough to put into the MacBook Air… something Apple is doubtlessly aware of as they threaten Intel to lower power consumption in mobile x86 processors or lose Apple’s business.
Right now, the rumor that Apple will bring out an iPad 3 or iPad 2 HD in October isn’t looking particularly rosy. The A6 CPU isn’t ready and neither is a Retina Display. Without either of those components ready for mass production, there doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason for Apple to hurry up the time frame for the third-generation of their tablet.
[via GigaOM]
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.
29 responses to “Delay In A6 Production May Mean No iPad 3 This Year… And Long Wait Next Year [Report]”
They always say that…ooohh the A5 is delayed….oooh the A6 is delayed. The iPad is on a yearly update. Anybody who thought there would be an iPad 3 later this year is nuts.
it was never coming out then anyway…..
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
One wonders what four cores on a table would be useful for. With the exception of a few specific scenarios, most apps aren’t allowed to run in the background, and few tasks really benefit from being split into multiple threads.
The only notable exception is web browsing because each javascript thread can have its own core. But I think few people would argue that the iPad 2 is slow because it only has “two cores”.
The future however is in GPU performance. Perhaps the PowerVR 6 series is at hand?
So ipad 3 takes the old iphone release date in June and the iphone release cycle now lines up with ipods in the fall
If you are a blogger/analyst/journalist who claimed there would be an iPad later this year and your rumor caused lots of hits and ad impression revenue, then you are business savvy, not nuts.
I don’t care when a new iPad arrives as long as Flash is made available…since that will Never happen while Jobs has control, I just Don’t Care
iPhone 6, iPad 3 going to sport A6 Processor ? http://bit.ly/oDYPsY
No Flash …….get over it……
Suck it up…the iPad 2 is fine because I doubt the iPad 3 will bring any major revolution to the device. Doesn’t mean I’m not going to buy one, just means…buy a MacBook Air and chill out.
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If they were to put retina displays into the iPad 3 it’d need some pretty monstrous graphics capabilities.
Maybe the idea is that – with a quad-core processor – you could have a system that could swap between modes of a tri-core CPU & mono-core GPU for things like general web browsing, and a dual-core CPU & dual-core GPU for graphics-heavy applications?
With it all running from the one chip it would noticeably reduce the complexity & so power consumption of the device, while significantly increasing the versatility & flexibility of the system.
I’m pretty sure there are third-party Apps that do bring Flash to iOS without JailBreaking…
Couldn’t tell you what they’re called, though…
Brightest bulb in your class were you? Get over yourself. The marketplace has already decided – we don’t need flash. It is bloated buggy and unsecure crapware that is rapidly being replaced. It plain english – it sucks.
Yeah, but he’s not here for facts. He’s here because he doesn’t like what Apple is doing.
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