Must Read: No niche for iPad: Why I returned mine

Topic: Hardware

Quietly rejoicing

Summary: And, speaking of the insanely great: iPad's A4 != x86 It's a PA Semi designed PPC/SOC derivitive.

Paul Murphy

By Paul Murphy for Managing L'unix |

2000 more engineers for Sun! Mostly on SPARC and Solaris - I don't know how they're going to make that java marriage work, but if I were on the Sun side in those discussions, I'd feel pretty secure right now.

Build to order manufacturing! Finally! (Guess Oracle has the guts - Sun's people have pointed at HP's SAPping for years as THE reason not to go this way.)

And the sleeper slipped into the pack? the application appliance desktop computer (aka Sun Ray) driven off the local cloud (i.e. 2 CMT machines.)

And, speaking of the insanely great: iPad's A4 != x86 It's a PA Semi designed PPC/SOC derivitive. Know why it doesn't cost a thousand bucks and still works fast on low power? Did I mention.. A4 != x86 ?

Seriously, does IT news get better than this?

Topics: Hardware, Operating Systems, Oracle, Processors, Software

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7 comments
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  • Doesn't Apple owning PA Semi mean

    they get them cheaper? My bet is that it's ARM based, great to load Linux onto it!
    Ron Bergundy
    Reply Vote

    • My bet

      is that it will be different enough from ARM that an entirely new architecture port would be needed to install Linux.
      Michael Kelly
      Reply Vote

    • Yes - it's ARM compatible

      but remember that arm is a ppc licensee.

      As for getting them cheaper - yes, they're a lot cheaper, and a lot faster, but it's because of the design, not because Apple owns the designer.

      Remember with x86 you're not paying for great design (on the contrary, x86 is a leaning jack's beanstalk of patches piled on fixes piled on kludges) you're paying for great manufacturing.

      Here Apple reverses that: great design, job shop mfg.
      murph_z
      Reply Vote

  • You did look at the iPad didn't you?

    No camera. no usb, no Flash, no multitasking, no widescreen (yeah I know 1024x768 tricked out to look like it's widescreen).

    More expensive than a netbook running Win 7 with not even half the features, to say nothing about being able to run grown up applications (no matter how many useless iPhone apps you can get)

    But hey since it does very little, I bet it is fast - there I said something positive ;-)

    Apple once again proves you can fool some of the people all of the time.
    tonymcs@...
    Reply Vote

    • bet you hated the ipod and iphone too

      There's a camera/headphones/skype kit on the way to turn this thing into a video conferenceing iphone.

      It runs MacOS X - so full multi-tasking and no tech restriction on running most apps. The downside, of course, is that the current MacOS apps are written for Intel and so don't work. Still, 130K worth of iphone utilities is a start.
      murph_z
      Reply Vote

      • Multi tasking? Not according to Jason

        Your fellow bloggers say no multitasking: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=5871&tag=col1;post-11947

        The ipod is very good, although I prefer the zune. If the iphone was a better PHONE, I might like it. It's a great app platform, but it sucks as a phone.
        ITLeader
        Reply Vote

  • This is the chip behind it all

    http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARMCortex-A9_MPCore.html

    It's not ARM "compatible" it is ARM.

    Does the Cortex range have anything to do with ppc?
    junknstuff@...
    Reply Vote
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