[geeks] iPad - a 'Miss' for me I'm afraid

[Joshua Boyd]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 08:08:07AM +0000, Mark Benson wrote:
> > Maybe it was Apple's original plan to use Atom,
> > but then again they must have been designing their custom ARM chip for
> > some time now.
> 
> Here's the big kicker. It's a custom designed SoC, yes, but it uses standard
> ARM cores... It's 1 (maybe more CPUs) stock ARM Cortex-A9 and a companion core
> called 'Mali', which handles the video, cores on a die[1]. That means no
> patents, no ownership of the design and it's gonna open the doors to
> competition from other manufacturers big style. Apparently the chips are made
> by Samsung (who seem to be the don of ARM manufacturers these days).

You assume that reusing a couple of ARM cores precludes building in
additional Apple specific hardware to reduce the parts list.  We won't
know how much they integrated onto the A4 chip until someone does a
teardown and sees what is missing.