iPad Much Faster than iPhone

The Apple iPhone has been a game-changing device in many ways, but it will never win any performance awards. Its processors are underclocked, meaning set to run slower than they can, to reduce heat and conserve battery power. The result is a phone that is decidedly lacking in pep.

But the iPad looks to be much faster. At its launch Wednesday, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs said “it just screams.” Those who have had hands-on experience concur. “It is blazingly fast from what we can tell,” wrote gadget blog Engadget.

“This thing is very fast,” said Nathan Brookwood, research fellow with Insight 64, who attended the event. “You flip from landscape to portrait mode and before your hand has stopped moving the screen has caught up. That has not been my experience with the iPhone. So it’s a very fast processor.”

As is typical of Apple product launches, Jobs did not go into technical details. He simply said the iPad uses the “Apple A4” processor, which Brookwood joked sounds like the name of a highway in England.

It’s not technically a CPU, either, as Jobs called it, but a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) design. Chip enthusiast site Bright Side of News revealed on Thursday a discussion its editors had with Warren East, CEO of CPU core designer ARM, during an event in Las Vegas at CES.

According the report, East said Apple is using ARM’s Cortex-A9 MPCore, meaning a dual-core design, with a GPU from ARM, called the Mali 50-Series. ARM has begun pairing its CPU and GPU together as a selling point.

Read the rest at Hardware Central.