New Tablet will be an iPhone on Steroids?

Thursday, January 14, 2010

iPhone 3Gs ARM processor

Apple’s fabled new tablet, which has yet to be even confirmed, is rumored to be packing all the fire power of an iPhone 3Gs and a whole lot more. If we are to believe the leaks, slips and hype, Apple’s announcement of the tablet computer on January 27 will wow us with it’s capabilities and speed.

An ARM processor will be de rigeur of course. The advanced rISC (reduced instruction set computer) machine processor started out as a product from lowly Acorn Computers. Wikipedia states they were originally conceived as a processor for desktop personal computers, a market now dominated by the x86 family used by IBM PC compatible computers. The relative simplicity of ARM processors made them suitable for low power applications. This has made them dominant in the mobile and embedded electronics market as relatively low cost and small microprocessors and microcontrollers.

The speedy iPhone 3Gs uses a Cortex-A8 ARMv7-A processor, and it is likely the new tablet will too, if not a faster and beefier one. According to comments found on the Blue Marble, the majority of speedup in the 3GS is due to the Samsung S5PC100 core applications processor. This is an ARM A8 device and is, in several ways, superior to the Samsung S3C6400 processor found in the previous revision.

These CPU upgrades, in conjunction with a doubling of the main system memory to 256MB of RAM, has done wonders when it comes to application launching speed, Safari page loading and rendering, and general application operation. One place where performance will be especially felt are in the numerous 3D games for the platform. These applications will of course benefit from the improved horsepower and available memory, but they will also benefit from vastly upgraded graphics hardware as well. Goodness knows the tablet will be needing that in spades!

Along with these 3Gs clues, we have a whole raft of other tablet features being mentioned such as:

The tablet’s multi-touch gestures are “out of control.”
It runs on the iPhone kernel.
The internal model number is K48AP.
There hasn’t been an updated iPhone OS build because there’s too much tablet-related code/references in the OS and Apple obviously didn’t want that to leak. Oops.
The tablet is basically an “iPhone on steroids.”
To top it all off, France Telecom let slip the tablet will have a webcam.

Inching ever closer to the announcement day, we are loving every minute of the wild speculations! Bring it Steve!

This is a story by The Apps Machine.