Apple doesn't own a fab. The CPU die was also made by Samsung.
Obviously Apple doesn't have a fab, and it really doesn't matter who they used to fabricate the die.
We've seen no evidence that this particular die was made by Samsung. That you would assert this as if it were a fact is part of the problem. It may be likely, consistent, or reasonable to expect that the die was probably made by Samsung.... but it is not a known fact.
This may seem pendantic, but the problem here, and with much reporting about these things, is that people assert speculation as if it were fact, and eventually, since Apple doesn't respond to speculation, people start believing it to be true.
You do not know this. You are expressing an opinion based on ignorance of the nature of CPUs. ARM licenses designs, but they also license the right to make derivative designs. We do not know whether Apple has used an ARM off the shelf design or produced a derivative.
Also, one doesn't need to compare the patterns - if there are two cores, it would be obvious without needing to compare to anything else.
Again, your ignorance of this situation, leads you to assert as fact a supposition made by someone else who is also ignorant.
The logic goes something like "The cortex A9 has a two core version, therefore if this CPU has one core it must be a cortex A8."
There are numerous errors here. First off, there is a single core version of the cortex A9.
More importantly, though, is the presumption that Apple cannot make a derivative CPU, and that they must have chosen an A8 or an A9.
This is a presumption based on a lack of understanding on the part of the people making it.
They think of Apple as a computer maker, and so they presume that Apple can't produce it's own cores. (And really, they don't even know what a core actually is.)
Apple used hard blocks supplied by ARM for most of the design.
When you state facts that you do not know to be true, are you a liar? Or does one have to prove that those facts are false before one calls another a liar?\
At any rate, you are making assertions of fact here for which you do not have any knowledge.... unless you work for Apple and are divulging trade secrets.
They did not do full custom physical design at the core level.
Speaking of contradictions this is actually a nonsensical statement on one hand, and something you cannot, again, know on the other.
But it doesn't mean Apple can't go fully custom, and it certainly doesn't mean that this is any sort of a commodity.
When you talk about "Cortex-A8" you are talking about a commodity. The people who question whether this is an A8 or an A9 think that these are CPUs like the 386 or 486. They are not even aware of the fact that there were quite a few variations of the 386. That's far beyond their understanding.
This is why you said presumed that if it had 1 core it's an A8. This is as silly as presuming that because it has one core it's an Intel Strong Arm design from earlier in the decade.
Just because something has four wheels does not make it a truck, and preclude it from being a car.
No it's not. It is an implementation of the licensed cortex-a8 ARM microarchitecture
First off, again, you don't know this. You're just making assertions based on a lack of understanding. Secondly, even if it includes Cortex A8 technology, Apple has a derivatives license and thus they can do anything they want. Thirdly your assertion that it is A8 vs. A9 is based on a lack of understanding, and presumption that its impossible for Apple to have made their own derivative.
Cortex refers to SoC IP, not to a specific chip.
Do you know what IP is? Do you know what it means to license IP?
Your argument is that all AMD processors are actually intel processors because they contain the x86 microarchitecture.
You are right. The chip is A4. It's based on Cortex-A8 micro-architecture (same as iPhone 3GS). Combined with the fact that it has 1MHz frequency and 256 MB RAM it should be a little faster than CPU in 3GS but probably slower than Nexus One (also Cortex A8 based, same 1Mhz but 512MB RAM).
Yeah, you don't know anything about it, obviously. You're just repeating nonsense you read on the web from other people know know nothing about it.
Further, Apple hasn't shipped a computer based on a 1MHz CPU since the days of the Apple II, which, if I recall correctly, was 1.47MHz.
It used to be that people who were engineers would talk about things, and the rest of the world wouldn't.
Now people who know nothing about something read a site like ars technica, written by people who know marginally more than nothing about something, and take it as the gospel truth.
And then they go onto forums and argue with people who do know something about the subject.
But since they know nothing, they don't even comprehend what the person who does know something said, and so their arguments are nonsense.
Hell, actually making arguments would be a nice change.
You just reasserted a big string of terms whose meaning you can't fathom. But you've got the certainty of the ignorant to back it up, don't you?
In tests it is faster than the Nexus One. Not sure what they clock nexus one at, but I think the memory bus on the A4 is twice as wide as the Nexus One's, and I also think the memory controller operates at a higher frequency.
Yeah, the memory bus claim is pretty funny. I can't say it is not twice as wide, but I can say its absolutely hilarious to see people say that the CPU is "just a cortex A8" and then claim the "memory bus is twice as wide". Unless people are in the habit of making SoCs with a memory controller whose bus is half the width of the CPUs, it would be pretty pointless to double the width of the memory bus without redesigning the CPU, in which case it is not a "cortex A8", which while we're at it, is more like a confederation of designs than a single entity.
And evne then it is a design.
Reality is, nobody really knows, and likely the A4 is as different from the Cortex A8 as the Cortex A9 is.
I do not know if they use any type of memory virtualization in these phones (it looks like they do not) but if they do, then most likely A4 will be faster on apps that fit into 256MB and slower on apps with higher memory requirements.
In iPhone OS applications are constrained in the amount of memory they are allowed to use and there is a delegate method which is called to tell the application that it needs to free up some memory.
For a variety of reasons, the OS and Apps all fit in memory (which is not to say there's not some use of mass storage for things other than file storage.)
. There is plenty of magic to be found when using one. It's the UI. It has drastically shrunk the gap in what you want it to do and how you do it. The larger screen makes it far more instinctual than an iPhone ever was. I have shown it to people that struggle to use an iPhone and they understand and use the iPad like a pro in seconds. I have been truly astounded at how quickly these people understand the device.
