A4 Teardown

Because Apple didn’t use an off the shelf processor for the iPad, there’s been a lot of speculation about exactly what’s inside it. The guys at iFixit, with some help from Chipworks, have posted a really nice teardown of the A4 processor.

There’s less there than some of the speculation would make you believe, but it’s still an interesting package. Basically, it’s three stacked dies. Two of them are Samsung 1 Gb SDRAM chips. The third is the CPU. That appears to be an ARM A8. They haven’t identified the integrated GPU, but the standard guess is that it’s a PowerVR SGX 535. Click through to their teardown for lots of great pictures.

Interesting, but I’m still waiting for one of the Tegra 2 based tablets. Rumor has it that they’ve been delayed though.