Apple iPad announced

Well supposedly it was going to use the Atom Z530 so that'd be with Poulsbo, but the design apparently had only a 5 hour battery life.

 

Why the hell would they do that? Lincroft has been available for quite a while.

 

There was a supposedly leaked internal document posted a few weeks back, which was HP's comparison of their tablet with the iPad.

It pointed out the things it had which the iPad didn't such as webcam, USB.

But it acknowledged that the battery life was inferior, like 3-4 hours IIRC.

 

I'm sure HP is aware of this, so there must be some reason. Anyone actually seen W7 running on Moorestown yet? I can imagine this being practically unusable. And probably still using at least twice as much power as a comparable ARM solution.

 

Always with the featuritis. Honestly, such people need to take an art of leaving things out class from Apple. Yes, techies will always hate it, but elegance is something any normal consumer can see.

 

If Win7 can't run at 1024*768 on Lincroft at decent clip then it's time for Microsoft to start firing and hiring. Getting a modern OS to get out of the way (CPU time wise) simply should not be that difficult. If they can't cut the crap in the OS down to a low enough level it's pure incompetence. They should have seen the need for win7 to run on MID/Netbooks/etc coming, even if they didn't see the tablet hype coming.

PS. when you take into account the backlight I really doubt a Moorestown tablet is going to use twice the juice of an Arm tablet.

 

I didn't mean to imply that. Just the core logic.

 

What's Moorestown's power consumption? AFAIK the whole iPad with it's IPS panel needs between 2W (e.g. video playback or browsing via WLAN) and 5W (e.g. full brightness & WLAN activity & nonstop 3D intense gaming).

 

I don't think anyone has independently tested a Moorestown based design yet.

BTW, it should probably be downclocked to ~750 MHz of course (on non trivial stuff, barrel shifting is nice but not common, Atom is generally 50% faster per clock than an A8 ... so that's a conservative underclock for parity performance).

 

Really? Can you provide a link that sustains this claim?

 

http://www.eeejournal.com/2010/05/benchmarks-atom-vs-ipad-a4-vs-iphone.html

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/4/7/the-coming-war-arm-versus-x86.aspx?pageid=0

 

You can dismiss results for Atom with HT; comparing a single core vs a multi-threaded one is apple vs orange; and even with HT Atom isn't 50% faster.

The best Atom score is ~2.75 and the best A8 is ~2.6.

Outside of poor FP performance, which is something that has been discussed here long ago, and poor memory bandwidth (which isn't necessarily a property of A8), I fail to see Atom 50% faster. The Firefox and JS scores are probably not comparable (for instance, v8 work on ARM has only recently received the attention it deserves for ARMv7 chips).

My own experiments make me think that Atom and A8 cores are about as "efficient" (again if you are not bound by IEEE FP computations).

 

Shouldn't it in general be hw X + sw implementation Y + target applications Z in the end?

 

Apple announced they sold over a million of these.

I didn't expect this kind of appeal for the device.

 

That's because it's a MAGICAL product.

 

Actually pretty impressive. The category might actually live this time.

 

Having just had a brief play with one, I think maybe they are.

 

Ipad conformancy for openGL es2.0 and 1.1 just added to Khronos site, confirms graphics driver is the same as the one in the iphone (although a later revision), and that the processor is ARMv7. Damn, I was just starting to beleive the PowerPC conspiracy

http://www.khronos.org/adopters/conformant-products/

 

analysis of A4:-
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224701036&pgno=1

Interesting point is that the processor in the latest itouch is fabbed at 45nm, whereas the one in the latest iphone is 65nm. I always assumed the itouch/iphone processors where similar across generations.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224701036&pgno=1

 

Well, Arun's right as always. According to the new leak the iPhone 4th-gen's SoC seems to be almost identical to the iPad's, nothing fancy here.
From what I can tell, same APL0398 and K4X2G643GE (256MB RAM) part numbers as on the A4.

http://taoviet.vn/showthread.php?t=16471

The site is pretty slow right now. Engadget's article about it:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/12/next-generation-iphone-escapes-in-vietnam/

Update: Obviously Engadget looked the numbers up as well by now and could make out one more number.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/12/fourth-generation-iphone-teardown-reveals-a4-microprocessor/
No word about the RAM just yet from engadget, but I guess it's only a matter of minutes now until they post an update with more information.

Update 2: Someone pointed out that this new prototype is the 16GB version and maybe the new
"low-end" $99 version of the iPhone with a slower SoC,
like the $99 8GB iPhone 3G right now. And that the high-end version with 80GB
could have more RAM or even a faster/better/newer SoC. IMHO that's unlikely.
Even more RAM seems like a long shot.