Apple A4

The Apple A4 is a SOC (system-on-chip), used in Apple's iPad tablet computer, which runs at 1 GHz.^[1] It was announced on January 27, 2010.

Unlike other Apple products such as the iPhone and iPod Touch which use a system on chip designed by Samsung, Apple chose to design the SoC used in the iPad itself. As such, the A4 is designed by Apple’s in-house chip design department, formerly known as P.A. Semi. While the A4 was designed by Apple, it is rumoured to be manufactured by Samsung using it's 45 nm process^[2].

The system on a chip combines the CPU with an integrated graphics processing unit as well as other parts. The main processor is an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore.^[3] The graphics processor design is likely to be a PowerVR SGX series 5 (the SGX545) core, plus a PowerVR VXD for video and audio playback, licensed from Imagination Technologies, which confirmed Apple was a licensee on 18th December 2009.^[4] The A4 is capable of running OpenGL ES 2.x applications and possibly OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.0 applications.

As a proprietary designed CPU it is unlikely that it will be used outside of Apple's products. Competing designs featured in similar tablet products are Qualcomm's (1 GHz) Snapdragon SoC, Texas Instruments OMAP 4 (1 GHz)SoC, and Nvidia Tegra 2.

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[1] ttp://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

[2] ttp://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222500014

[3] ttp://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/1/27/apple-a4-soc-unveiled---its-an-arm-cpu-and-the-gpu!.aspx

[4] ttp://www.imgtec.com/corporate/AnnualReports/IMGAnnualReport2009.pdf (page 14)

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