William Goodall's Blog Occasional mutterings

Up until now, a shroud of mystery has surrounded Apple’s custom engineered A4 system-on-chip; we know it’s clocked at 1GHz, likely tied to Apple’s prior acquisition of P.A. Semi and manufactured by Samsung. Outside of that, the only other knowledge we’ve gained has come not from the mouth of Cupertino, but from the extracting wizards over at iFixit. The A4 contains at least three layers of circuitry layered on top of each other, though it’s packaged just like the iPhone processor: microprocessor in one package and two memory modules in the other package. We also learned that the iPad RAM is actually inside of the A4 processor package, and we’re expecting to learn even more from those folks in the coming days. All that said, there’s still much debate on whether Apple’s own silicon can stand up to Qualcomm’s heralded 1GHz Snapdragon, the chip powering Google’s Nexus One among other things. AnandTech pitted their iPad against the iPhone 3GS (600MHz ARM Cortex A8) and the aforesaid Nexus One (1GHz Snapdragon QSD8250), using a number of website loads as the primary benchmark. Overall, the A4 proved to be around 10 to 30 percent faster, though it’s impossible to say what effect the operating system has on things. Have a gander at that source link for more — we get the feeling the competitions have just begun.Apple’s A4 SoC faces Qualcomm Snapdragon in knock-down-drag-out benchmarking test originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | AnandTech | Email this | Comments [From Apple’s A4 SoC faces Qualcomm Snapdragon in knock-down-drag-out benchmarking test]

That’s very interesting. How custom is this chip? Apple does have an architecture license for ARM that allows them to tweak the chip design.

As expected, Apple gave the New York Times’ David Pogue , USA Today’s Ed Baig and the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg an early crack at the iPad for reviews that just appeared. [From First iPad reviews appear, mostly thumbs up]

It only remains to be seen how well it actually sells.

Shipping for pre-orders has been pushed back more than a week, to April 12 The demand curve for Apple’s (AAPL) new tablet computer crossed the supply curve sometime overnight Friday. By Saturday morning, the ship date for iPad pre-orders, originally set to guarantee delivery by April 3, had been pushed back to Tuesday April 12. Customers who had already pre-ordered are still scheduled to get their iPads next Saturday. Meanwhile, the option to reserve an iPad for pick-up at an Apple Store has disappeared from Apple.com entirely. That does not mean that there will no iPads available for sale next Saturday. Customers who reserved them over the past two weeks were told at the time that their iPads could be picked up between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday April 3. After 3 p.m., any iPads that haven’t been collected may be made available, while supplies last, on a first-come, first-served basis. It’s not clear whether the shortfall is due to strong demand, short supply or both. Published estimates of the number of iPads Apple was expected to have on hand by April 3 range from a high of 1 million to a low of 300,000. By Friday, according to the best available estimate, 240,000 iPads had been pre-ordered online. The only published report on reservations suggests that they’ve been coming in at roughly the same rate. Kudos to the folks at Planet iPad, who were the first to spot the change in ship dates. See also:

iPad week two: 240,000 pre-orders
iPad week one: 190,000 pre-orders
Day 1 estimate: 120,000 iPad sales
Apple sells 50,000 iPads in two hours
The wild iPad Ruckus begins
How many iPads will Apple sell?

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

[From Apple has run out of iPads]

I wonder how this affects the UK launch? No impulse buy for me I guess 🙂

Microprocessor company ARM says there will be more than 50 new tablets launching worldwide to compete with the iPad. [From iPad Could See 50 Tablet Rivals This Year]

It seems quite a few companies think it is a good idea if they are copying it already.

Apple on Thursday dropped the price of becoming an official Mac Developer to $99 a year.[From Apple drops price of Mac developer program]

Same as the iPhone dev program.

Jeff LaMarche on the Nexus One:

“Multitasking” is one of the much lauded benefits of Android over the iPhone. Of course, it’s not really multitasking. Everybody except most “tech pundits” knows that the iPhone’s Mach kernel supports full preemptive multitasking and also knows that at any given moment there are somewhere on the order of twenty daemons and other processes running on a stock (non-jailbroken) iPhone.

What people mean when they misuse this term is the ability to run more than one GUI application at a time, the way we do on our regular computers. And the Android certainly allows this. Only, it’s not really a point in Android’s favor. When you hit the home button, the previous application keeps running, which means it keeps eating memory, keeps using processor cycles, and keeps eating battery. To truly quit most applications requires a multi-step navigation that is neither intuitive nor well-documented. The ability to have more than one GUI application at a time on a device with such a small screen isn’t as important as some make it out to be, since you can’t actually interact with more than one a time.

Lots of interesting points in the post.