Yeah, the iPad will and 5 years ago is not that long a time ago. Which is kind of the question. The PC of 5 years ago was better and the PC of 15 years ago was a lot worse. The PC of how many years ago is about the same?
I’m pretty sure the iPad isn’t a cell phone. Correct me if I am wrong.
A big one that doesn’t make phone calls, but yes. 
Actually not.
All the Intel (not intel) points to Apple using an in-house designed processor (the A4) with integrated graphics. Apple bought PA semi awhile ago just for jobs (not Jobs) like this.
The A4 is just an ARM processor bundled with some specialized subprocessors. It’s not an original design.
I guess that all depends on your definition of “original” and “design.”
It was designed by Apple for Apple - you can’t buy it on the open market.
That qualifies as an original design to me. Just because it reuses IP, that doesn’t make it not “original.”
Well, it wasn’t an “in house designed processor” in that they didn’t desing the CPU. They just integrated it with a graphics processor and maybe something else.
When you’re finished picking nits on the SDMB, you might want to head over to Wikipedia and correct them, too.
And, every other report on the A4 on the web.
How is it “picking nits”? The point you were trying to make was incorrect, so I pointed that out. It’s not a “nit” when the whole point of the post was wrong.
From here:
It’s an ARM A9-Cortex CPU, which you can buy in the open market, put onto one chip with an ARM Mali graphics chip, and made with Apple’s fabs. They didn’t design the CPU or the GPU, although they put it into one package - but other companies do the same thing with a similar CPU. There was almost no design work on the part of Apple and they certainly could not have been said to have designed the CPU.
Do you say the same thing about Silabs or Atmel with their 8051 variants?
When a company designs and has manufactured (Apple has no fabs) a “semicustom” processor, it’s just splitting hairs to say that they didn’t design their own chip.
Referring to the A4 as an “in house designed processor” is extremely misleading if not incorrect. People almost always mean CPU when they say “processor”, and the CPU component is an A9 Cortex, nothing semi-custom about it.
The additional components they integrated it with onto the system-on-a-chip weren’t by their design either, at least the GPU.
“People” don’t know the difference between a microprocessor and a food processor. Unless one specifically states otherwise, common usage is that the “processor” is what makes a computer go, which is exactly what the A4 does.
What is the “in house designed processor” you mentioned earlier? The end result of them taking a central processing unit that someone else designed and merging it on one chip with a graphics processor that someone else designed? You seem to be set on giving Apple more credit than they should, for some reason. The only custom designing they did was sticking a few components onto one chip - a process around the mobile world that’s fairly common. There’s essentially nothing unique or new or even apple-specific about the A4, but the way you said it implies that Apple designed it the components themselves.
You are putting words in my mouth.
I didn’t go into any detail about the exact process that Apple followed.
All I said is that Apple used the resources that they got from the purchase of PA semi to design the A4. I never said whether this was a simple cut-and-paste job or a complete new design from the ground up.
I find it intriguing that you feel the need to make sure the world knows that this is not a new CPU core - but I never said it was.
I was trying to add information and dispel ignorance. Apple has sort of quietly marketed the A4 as “Apple’s new cpu” but it’s not really technically accurate. So I thought I was clearing up a misconception. You definitely seem to have more interest in defending this idea and playing semantical games than I do about it. I’m done. The relevant information is in the thread.
FWIW, your point was well taken by some (me, at least). I was also under the impression that the iPad chip was designed by Apple until I read elsewhere that it was a chip from someone else (and that is already being used in other devices) that was bundled with some other elements by Apple.
The work Apple has done is not without merit. Packaging stuff together is an added value in a device where simplicity and space are desirable. It is not something they designed from the ground up, though. Not that it would automatically make it better or worse.
This is tough to answer because a phone and a pc are very different animals. Even when you take account of the differences, its important to separate video and cpu performance.
A quick googling shows the iphone to get around 5 or 6 mflops. That’s really not much. Half what a late 80’s 486 would do. There are other benchmarks, but its difficult to choose one that really can compare different designs for different jobs.
Video performance is probably going to be the most odd thing about modern cell phones. They can do 3D acceleration and lots of colors but cant output high resolutions.
You wouldnt want to make your primary computer an iphone or anything. You could probably get away with a lightweight linux distribution on something like the Sheevaplug (power sipping, ARM based computer) and still have an acceptable level of performance, but cell phones arent even at that level yet.
This is a very revealing point. mflops are a measure of floating point math (millions of floating point operations per second) which is used for a lot of number crunching but not actually so important for the typical sorts of task a smart phone does. mips is another more general measure (millions of instructions per second), and here the iphone processer compares a lot more favorably. Wiki lists the iphone’s processer as performing around 2000 MIPS. That’s about equivalent to a top-speed pentium 3 or lower-speed pentium 4 (according to this wiki chart). That’s roughly corresponding to an average computer about 10 years ago.
Moral of the story? For basic tasks, the iphone might be comparable to a ten year old computer, but if you want to run a physics simulation you’d be better off dusting off that 25 year old computer in the attic.
Well, my wardrobe is heavily influenced by the 1980s…
Yeah, but ARM is a RISC CPU, i.e. each instruction doesn’t do very much. MIPS comparisons with a CISC CPU like a Pentium are not that meaningful.