Apple Launches Its Own CPU, the 1GHz A4

[blasterth]

[citation][nom]TH[/nom]In fact, at its current spec and frequency, the Apple A4 can play back HD video for 10 hours before requiring a full battery charge..[/citation]
you talking about a car battery?

 

[blasterth]

I would compare the current A4 with an Atom, more than with a smart-phone CPU, seeing that the iPad is more a light netbook than a big smartphone(at least comparing by size).

 

[Guest]

"... the A4 has potential to kick the living shnizzles out of those CPUs."

And you base this on what data? I dont see a speed comparison to back this up. Stop spouting random fan-boy BS.

QC's latest Snapdragon is 1.5GHz and can go dual core. Add to that the fact that a QC baseband chip will outperform most any other.. and I'd rather stick with that. Not all of the iPhone issues are ATT, the baseband chip in the iPhone sucks.

 

[matt87_50]

[citation][nom]gayan[/nom]YEY...more competition = better products+ lower prices for us the consumer....[/citation]

heh, well, it is an apple product, so I'd hold the phone on that "lower prices" bit...

"at its current spec and frequency, the Apple A4 can play back HD video for 10 hours before requiring a full battery charge."

wtf? doesn’t that depend on HOW BIG the batteries are?? the ipad is like 4 times the size of a smart phone, so over 3/4 of it is probably batteries...

 

[masterjaw]

Nothing impressive. This is just being dragged by the Apple hype. And quite funny to quote that a CPU can play HD for 10 hours. Does a CPU have its own power now? Maybe you should say thanks to the battery first.

 

[Shadow703793]

[citation][nom]gayan[/nom]YEY...more competition = better products+ lower prices for us the consumer....[/citation]
Not if they lock it to "Apply" only products..... (ie. OSX)

 

[Guest]

iPad: Built-in 25Whr rechargeable lithium-polymer battery...

That is in no way comparable to any smartphone/mediaplayer battery... it holds like 25 to 40 times more charge... So to talk about a device being able to play video for 10 hours and base this on a comparison of it's processor with others being used in smartphones and much smaller devices is just, well... stupid.

 

[Guest]

Sorry I made my calculations wrong.
Still it's around 10 times more powerfull than a normal smartphone battery.

 

[eklipz330]

lol high specs but what is it gonna be used for? multitasking? NOPE.

 

[descendency]

The A4's importance > the iPads importance

 

[saran008]

[citation][nom]gayan[/nom]YEY...more competition = better products+ lower prices for us the consumer....[/citation]
+^1

Benefits for End-users

 

[saran008]

[citation][nom]Shadow703793[/nom]Not if they lock it to "Apply" only products..... (ie. OSX)[/citation]
Hope they won't lock

 

[hakesterman]

A 1 GHZ processor at this point in time is like creating a 4 cylinder engine tommorow and bragging how great it is.

 

[Guest]

If the ipad has a 25Wh battery, then that is over 17X the capacity of the google phone running on a snapdragon processor with a 1.4Wh battery. The google phone supports up to 7 hours play back, so if you scaled the google phone to include a 25Wh battery, you would have 119 hours of video play back on the google phone, vs. 10 hours on the ipad. That's an order of magnitude difference, so I'm not that impressed.

The other thing I'm left wondering is how the ipad compares to the removable tablet inside Lenovo's Ideapad U1. It seems much thinner with about the same battery life, but there isn't enough data on either to really compare.

 

[Jackalope73]

I think we are all being a little of critical here. Lets all wait for the "living shnizzles" benchmarks. The A4 might in fact be the shnizzle churning monster the public has been dying for since Snoop Dogg updated the user agreement to limit usage of his intellectual property. In related news Snoop Dogg has filed suit claiming Shnizzles technology is a direct infringement of Shizzel technology and the public user agreement for developers. Snoop could not be reached for comment as this is totally made up, but sources quote Snoop as saying after the release "But I know some people that know some people that robbed some people." Mr. Jobs was also unavailable for comment, however is reported to be very good friends with Charlie Brown and was not aware that his dog had a competing technology, or that his little yellow bird knew Jimmy Hendrixs. This is obviously a shot at the “Urban Informer” platform released earlier this year as an updated mobile device meant to compete with the industry all in one “I” computing devices. Dubbed the snitch by no one, after several people were arrested for publishing illegal acts on the internet for all to see, and criticized as re branding of dated technology. The question was asked “what's the difference?” with Snoop clarifying the technology with this statement “A snitch wears a wire. A snitch is the scum of the information industry” referring to the total wireless connectivity features of the Urban Informer. What's next for the battle of these industry titans? Absolutely nothing, but is apparent that a new mobile music device code named “Woodstock” is on the horizon.

 

[jacobdrj]

Sounds like the proc of choice for the next iTouch/iPhone and will put pressure on nvidia's tegra line. I dig it. I don't have a need for any of these devices, but I can dig them...

 

[Guest]

a reviewer went through the hardware and the ipad only shows videos in little over 480P, that is what they are calling HD still btw nice design and interface it can output to tv's at what would be 600P; as a mobile device very nice and easy to use and will definitely bring tablets more mainstream(lower prices/more variety) I feel strongly this will make it to apple's line of mobile devices in stripped down versions. just my 2cents

 

[Guest]

I don't consider this comparable to a netbook if I can't install the applications I want, only the ones Apple approves. Besides, $499 is WAY too much to pay for a netbook. That much will get me a 2.2GHz laptop with tons more screen, storage, and RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6834220693

your Netbook is a 6 lbs. laptop. The iPad is only 4x lighter. The two products has totally different value propositions.

IMHO iPad is going to be a killer, but it's not for geeks. Apple products are not about the hardware but the user experience. Nowadays geeks represent only a small fraction of the market and there're a lot of people out there who has no clue about computers and they don't want to or can't invest a lot of time to learn how to operate an maintain a computer.
I have been thinking about buying a computer for my parents for a long time, but I just don't have the time to show them how to work and fix their issues. I think the iPad is going to be just fine for them because it has everything they ever need, internet, photo storage and browsing, email etc.

It is very similar to the Nintendo Wii in terms of product positioning because it's also focusing on an untapped market.
Apple is criticised because of its high prices. It doesn't enter markets where there is a huge competition (blue ocean strategy).

At the end of the day customer perception = reality. If customers like it it's gonna be popular.

 

[back_by_demand]

[citation][nom]vant[/nom]You can't really compare this to a netbook. Last time I checked a netbook has a keyboard.[/citation]
netbooks can also be connected to optical drives and watch/burn discs, edit video, edit pictures, watch flash, install software, play games, etc - basically be a small computer, as opposed to an expensive Kindle

 

[hemelskonijn]

Imagine this A4 not being based on ARM but on PPC not only has apple a lot of knowledge but they also where a big player in the AIM alliance.
Since they know how to switch platform and they did it a couple of times now this might be interesting since RISC and PPC in particular is a very interesting platform.
Dont forget that in example cell is a a spawn of the AIM alliance and while i dont think there will be any cell-like cpu's in apple products soon it helps that they dont tie themselves down to intel.

I would love to live in a world where there are actual choices in hardware and software platforms and while there is a load of software (os) to chose from it all comes down to x86 when talking about home computing.

 

[marraco]

Apple is a menace for all consumers.

apple is not married to open standards. As soon as it get an important fragment of the x86 PC users, apple will switch to another architecture, as did in the past.

If apple achieves what they want, we, the hardware lovers are all doomed.

 

[marraco]

[citation][nom]webbwbb[/nom]There is a significant problem with this plan. Apple LOVES exclusivity. They keep everything as proprietary as possible. With that in mind, think of the cost of producing a CPU. Nvidia's CEO has said that it generally costs a billion dollars to bring a chip from concept to manufacturing. Now you have a billion dollars spent in research and no profit and you still do not have a product. It can be pretty expensive to start manufacturing chips. At most companies will have spent around $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion but they can now sell their product and start to recoup some of the expense they put into it. However, this does not fit in with the Apple business model. Apple will want to keep it for internal use only. This means that after spending over a billion dollars and over a year on a product they now have to spend even more time and money on hardware and software development. This is while they command a small percentage of the PC market (3%). It MAY work for the mobile sector where they have more of an advantage but if they ever release a dud it could have huge ramifications. This tablet is a major gamble that could account for large losses if things do not go exceedingly well for them.[/citation]

Only Intel made manufacturing plants today.

Thats because as nanometers go littler, costs increase exponentially.

AMD was forced to sell his fabs, and share them with the rest of the industry, to share investment cost.

most chips manufacturers uses TSMC, or ex-AMD Global Foundries.

apple can't use his own fab. Necessarily uses TSMC or GF. Even Intel will be forced someday to share fabs.


______________
iZombies think that his dumbed down hardware value as much as a Ferrari.

 

[bamslang]

[citation][nom]deadlockedworld[/nom]$499 is pretty good for something with as much capability as a netbook.[/citation]

Except it doesn't have as much capability as my $250 netbook. No multi-tasking is so fail I can't even explain it. I honestly doubt I ever have less than 2 things running at once.

 

[captaincharisma]

[citation][nom]gayan[/nom]YEY...more competition = better products+ lower prices for us the consumer....[/citation]

how is this more competition? it just means apple is going to continue to make devices and now they do not have to hire another company to make the hardware for it. also what are the odds that apple will allow these chips to be in anything else but an apple product?

 

[metafor]

This is kind of misleading because it implied that all this playback is being done in software. There is almost certainly a dedicated H.264 chip in these things or a dedicated 264 block on the processor.

This isn't necessarily true. The Tegra contains a 264 decoder/encoder but that's because it uses a version of the A9 without the SIMD (NEON) extensions. Snapdragon, for example, implements the NEON instruction set and doesn't use dedicated hardware for H.264, instead doing it in (optimized) software. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple did the same considering how they love proprietary media formats.