Yesterday, we told you about the brand new Apple A4 processor that installed in the iPad, but at the time we didn’t have too much info about it. The chip includes the Cortex-A9 MPCore (identical to the processor in the nVidia Tegra and Qualcomm Snapdragon), a ARM Mali 50-series GPU, and a memory controller all on one die.
As anyone could’ve guessed, the letter “A” in “A4” stands for Apple, and the difference between this chip and the Samsung one installed in the iPhone 3Gs is the clockspeed and core type. This is one of the main reasons which allows the iPad to get a more vibrant and dynamic graphical interface.
A4 runs at 1GHz while the chip on iPhone 3GS works clocked to 0,6GHz. This is one of main reasons why iPad can deliver a lively interface compared to stale iPhone one.
FSM EXCLUSIVE DEAL Reference designs for the Cortex-A9 call for either two or four cores. The architecture is the successor to the ARM Cortex-A8upon which the 600MHz iPhone 3GS is based. There are very high chances that the upcoming 4th gen iPhone to feature a chip like the A4. The processor doesn’t is power efficient and will allow the iPad to offer users 10 hours of battery life in use, and over a month of standby. This is certainly something we need in the iPhone, and something that will reduce the number of complaints from users around the world
[thx Jessey via AppleInsider]