The iPad is now in the hands of developers and consumers and we’ll hear a lot more about the specifications and features in the following days. The first things we need to know are the hardware features.
Benchmarks show that the iPad is twice as fast as the iPhone 3GS when running applications. The question remains: where is all this speed coming from? The A4 processor shares the same PowerVR SGX 535 GPU and same 256MB of RAM as the iPhone 3GS.
And has the processor one core, two cores or what? According to IO Registry Tree dumps, it looks like the A4 is based on a single Cortex A8 design instead of the new Cortex A9. The processor runs at 1GHz, looking more like the Samsung Hummingbird ARM processor. The company Intrinsity is responsible for the processor and it is believed Apple has recently acquired Intrinsity.
