Sam Oliver
Apple has never announced the amount of RAM built into any iPad or iPhone, preferring to focus less on technical specifications and more on the abilities of a device, and this week's new iPad unveiling was no different. But a source who spoke with The Verge said the new A5X processor found in the latest iPad will, in fact, feature a gigabyte of RAM.
That's twice that of the iPad 2 released last year, powered by the custom-built A5 processor. It's also double that of the iPhone 4S released late last year, which also featires the A5.
RAM limitations in previous chips were said to be driven by battery life concerns. Last October, Microsoft explained that RAM is constantly consuming power, so the more memory that is included with a system, the less battery life it gets.
Though the new iPad is expected to feature double the RAM, the performance improvement will have no effect on battery life. Apple announced on Wednesday that the new iPad will continue to offer 10 hours of operation when using Wi-Fi and 9 hours on 4G LTE networks.
Reports first surfaced ahead of Apple's iPad unveiling that Apple would increase the RAM in its custom processor. The information was derived from alleged iPad debug photos that leaked last month.
The new A5X processor features a dual-core CPU, the same as the A5. But its performance has been boosted by a new quad-core graphics processor that Apple says is twice as fast as the Nvidia Tegra 3 while offering four times the performance.
Amber Neely
Wesley Hilliard
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Malcolm Owen
Andrew Orr
114 Comments
Hopefully this will cut down on page refreshing in Safari.
This is good stuff. I'll take an updated GPU and RAM over a processor upgrade any day of the week.
The new A5X processor features a dual-core CPU, the same as the A5. But its performance has been boosted by a new quad-core graphics processor that Apple says is twice as fast as the Nvidia Tegra 3 while offering four times the performance.
The last sentence seems a bit odd, how can it be twice as fast with 4 times the performance? It's also interesting to note that it's listed at 2x the iPad 2 so they are in fact running 4x the pixels with just 2x the speed, which will result in the same effect we saw on the 3GS -> 4 transition, which is that graphics running at native resolution will run more slowly on the new one than the old one. It's only when the next one comes out (the equivalent of the iPhone 4S) that you see the performance go up.
1GB RAM is nice though, especially considering it's shared by the GPU.
Though the new A5X chip in Apple's third-generation iPad features the same dual-core CPU found in its predecessor, the system-on-a-chip is still believed to double the onboard RAM to 1 gigabyte.
Is it just me or does this paragraph seem to imply that the A5X is effectively the same as the A5 apart from more onboard RAM. Is there some distinction between the CPU and the system-on-a-chip side of things that I am missing?
I'm speculating, but "twice as fast as the Tegra 3" may refer to clock speed whereas "four times the performance" is obviously based on benchmarking and pushing pixels vs. clock speed. I was wondering at how simply adding two cores to double the performance from the A5 would be enough to cover 4x the pixels, but perhaps they made some other performance boosts as well, or (I'd guess) maybe the A5 graphic cores ware never even near full perfornace used at 1024x768.