The Silicon - Meet the A4

Before the first iPad was ever unboxed, photos had already leaked of its dissection. Admittedly, I was relieved as it meant I didn’t have to risk destroying mine to figure out how to get inside the chassis. Why was getting inside Apple’s new tablet such a big deal? Because it’s using Apple’s brand new SoC.

It’s called the A4 because it is the 4th generation SoC designed by Apple. That would make the silicon in the iPhone 3GS the A3, the A2 would be what’s in the iPhone and perhaps A1 was an older iPod chip? Either way, the A4 was the first we heard of Apple’s naming system.

For months leading up to the iPad announcement everyone assumed that Apple’s acquisition of PA Semi meant that the company was going to ditch Samsung and come forth with its own killer SoC. Would it be an out-of-order Cortex A9 design? Or would it be truly custom, similar to what Marvell or Qualcomm have done with their Armada and Snapdragon lines?

As with everything involving the iPad, rumors of the device’s silicon ran rampant. But the idea of Apple doing their own microprocessor architecture for the iPad was disappointing to me. To understand why, we have to look at Apple COO, Tim Cook’s recent statements on why Apple has been successful:

“We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose.”

Tim was talking about products there, but I believe his statement is applicable to the A4 as well. Apple is not a microprocessor company, nor does Apple want to toss its hat in with the likes of Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and TI as an SoC maker. History has shown us that the only way to be a successful microprocessor company is to be able to subsidize the high cost of designing a powerful architecture over an extremely large install base. That’s why x86 survived, and it’s why the ARM business model works.

Designing high performance SoCs just for use in the iPad and iPhone just doesn’t make sense. In the short term, perhaps, but in the long run it would mean that Apple would have to grow the microprocessor side of its business considerably. That means tons of engineers, more resources that aren’t product focused, and honestly re-inventing the wheel a lot.

The fact that the A4 appears to be little more than a 45nm, 1GHz Cortex A8 paired with a PowerVR SGX GPU tells me that Apple isn’t off its rocker. I don’t exactly know what Apple is doing with all of these CPU and GPU engineers in house, but licensing tech from the companies who have experience in building the architectures is still on the menu.

The A4 is a typical smartphone SoC. It’s got CPU, GPU and DRAM all on a single package. It also appears to be the same size as your typical smartphone SoC, meaning there’s a good chance we’ll see this thing in the next iPhone. The A4 has 256MB of on-package DRAM, just like the current iPhone 3GS SoC. Remember that memory is used for the OS, all applications as well as video memory. It’s a testament to just how lightweight the iPhone OS is.

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