“Linley Gwennap, senior editor for Microprocessor Report, my favorite technology magazine, penned an intriguing item over the long weekend, which I am just now getting to, regarding his examination of the characteristics of Apple’s’A5′ chip used in the company’s iPad 2,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s.
“Apple outpaces Nvidia’s graphics circuitry in [the] ‘Tegra 2’ chip, in terms of raw 3D performance, which is important for gaming on the devices, writes Gwennap,” Ray reports. “That comes from having a graphics processing unit on the A5 that’s 31-square-millimeters — as large as the entire surface area of all the digital logic on the Tegra 2.”
“The other large point Gwennap makes is that the roadmap for Apple’s chips may become more complex,” Ray reports. “It’s safe to assume Apple will make the next processor, presumably the A6, as a quad core part, sometime next year, in order to compete [with] quad core chips from Nvidia and others. But that chip will likely be too hot and too large to run in an iPhone, he surmises.”
Ray reports, “Gwennap notes that about 33 square millimeters of the A5 is extra circuitry that can’t be accounted for. It’s not the CPU, it’s not the GPU, it’s not any kind of integrated functions, such as wireless controller logic, etc., as all of that stuff is still external to the processor, as it was in the A4. And so, ‘Without information from Apple, determining all the reasons for the A5′s larger die is impossible,’ he concludes.”
Much more in the full article here.