Analysis: Apple's Business and what's Inside Apple's A4

All engineers would like their design to be a part of a successful product line.
Apple products are the best for their innovative and radical approach towards design.

At the heart of the apple ipad lies a tiny Silicon which is called the brain of the device. A decision maker and a support for all innovations. Thats Apple's A4 a system-on-chip (SoC). A SoC is a combination of Graphics processing unit (GPU), a low- power CPU, memory, and other peripherals.

Apple's Macintosh used to work on Motorola/ Freescale CPU. When Motorola/ Freescale failed to deliver with a high performance CPU it turned towards IBM and then later to Intel. Apple's Macintosh has used Intel processors till now.

Today, Macs remain beholden to Intel's specifications. If Intel can't keep pace, Apple will have to find yet another vendor for CPUs. But now, with the iPad's A4, Apple has demonstrated a new option: It has the ability to take existing designs and re purpose them to give its own products better performance than the competition.

It's extremely unlikely that Apple could leverage ARM architecture for the Mac, as those processors are specifically made for low-power devices, not high-performance workstations or general computing.

With the launch of custom SoC, Apple has clearly indicated that Apple believes in control over its products in every aspect.

If you look at the battery life they're talking about, the i-pad is bigger than the iPhone but it seems like they've done a better job with battery life.

Since "almost all" existing iPhone applications will run on the iPad, it's more likely that Apple is continuing to use upgraded versions of the same graphics cores present in the iPhone, which were created from designs licensed by Imagination Technologies, based in the U.K. But Apple owns just under 10 percent of the company and all iPhone touch models use Imagination's PowerVR MBC family of graphics cores.

A highly integrated SoC like the Apple A4 would take at least 12 to 18 months to design, debug, and manufacture, however, making it unlikely that P.A. Semi (Acquired by Apple) engineers designed it from scratch.
This makes it even more likely that the A4 chip is made primarily of designs that closely match existing ARM cores. Apple would have had to move awfully fast to design its own

ARM-compatible core and the A4 SoC in so short a time. That's why I think the A4 is built on existing cores from ARM.

Another "evidence" for an Arm based processor: the name A4 may stand for Advanced Apple Arm Architecture. The final question arises what will A5 SoC stand for ?

Inside Apple A4 may have amalgamation of these
CPU - Samsung core based on ARM i.e. Cortex A9 multicore CPU for low power.
GPU- Imagination Technologies for "deferred rendering"/ ARM Mali GPU
Memory- Samsung
Wireless chips- Broadcom

Apple clearly indicates that it want's to give the best into it's products, believes in control over its products in every aspect. It also signifies it understand its users and want to build custom specific Silicon and manage costs at each level.