Apple's A4: Are we there yet?

Paul Boldt, Don Scansen, Tim Whibley
EE Times (06/17/2010 10:26 AM EDT)

The Apple A4 discussion kicked off in earnest when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad on January 27. In an infamous series of slides tracing the roots of Apple back to the two Steves in his garage, Jobs introduced the Apple A4 processor that powers the iPad, operating at a clock frequency of 1GHz.

The first question was whether the A4 could be the first offspring spawned by Apple's April 2008 acquisition of PA Semi. However, it seemed there was not enough time for a brand new design. Jon Stokes provided an interesting early insight into the CPU-GPU combination and the potential role of PA Semi.

By the end of March the iPad was in the wild, allowing the teardown and reverse engineering houses to begin their work. The CPU core debate converged to the ARM Cortex-A8 once only a single core was found and more particularly to the "Hummingbird" implementation of this designed by Intrinsity. First silicon of this core was reported in July 2009 and announced one month later.

Once the acquisition was confirmed in April 2010, Intrinsity's name become much more prominent in the A4 discussion prompting Mark Anderson to take a look back at some earlier coverage of Intrinsity.

So where have the news, opinion and analysis taken us so far? Can we say that the A4 is truly differentiating hardware, or is it more of an evolution of those that came before it?

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