Apple’s launch of the iPad didn’t really rock my world. But, within the iPad presentation, there was a little something that got my spine tingling: Apple revealed that the iPad is powered by a heretofore unknown CPU - the A4.

To me this is much bigger news than the iPad itself. This is an Apple-developed CPU, which I think is a first for the company. Apple describe the A4 as a “1GHz custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip.” Early hands-on reports of the iPad seem to support this. One thing that is now well documented is that the iPad is very fast. Apple also claim run times of up to 10 hours and a standby time of up to 1 month for the iPad, so it’s clear that the A4 is very power-efficient.

So what do we know or can reasonably assume about the A4?

We know it runs at 1GHz which, in the case of the iPad, results in a respectable performance. We know that, as a “system on a chip,” it contains both a CPU (initial suspect is an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore) and a GPU (most likely a PowerVR SGX series 5 - the ARM Mali has also been suggested). So it’s multi-core capable and has a high-performance FPU. It’s also OpenGL capable.

It’s probably reasonable to anticipate that this chip, or its derivatives, will pop up in future iPods, iPhones and perhaps the Apple TV — along with any further mobile devices that Apple conceives — as well as the iPad and its future revisions.

I don’t think that the processor, at least in this form, will appear in Apple’s desktops or laptops — and it’s not needed there either.

What’s really exciting about the A4 is that it’s a first attempt - yet it competes very favourably with the established mobile CPUs from the likes of Qualcomm, et al.

I’ll bet the launch of the iPad has caused concern in the boardrooms of quite a few companies. It’s going to be very interesting to see how this plays out.

Apple have finally unveiled a tablet computer, the iPad. The anticipation leading up to this launch and the speculation surrounding it has been truly staggering. Yet I find myself strangely underwhelmed by the device.

Continue Reading…

As interest mounts in the upcoming launch of Apple’s highly anticipated yet still completely speculative iTablet/iSlate/iNextBigThing, the industrial designers at long-time Apple partner Frog Design, have opened their archives to present some proposals for an early Apple tablet (code-named Bashful).

Concepts for this early pre-touch tablet included one with an attached keyboard and one with a floppy disk drive and convenient handle for maximum portability. An attached stylus helped the user interact with the screen. One Frog/Apple tablet concept also included an attached phone.

When a web-site has been running since 1996¹ you would expect it to have enjoyed some evolution, with the odd redesign thrown in along the way. The web-site at apple.com is one such site. Flickr user Kernel Panic maintains a gallery of screen captures of Apple’s home page and it represents an interesting journey through the history of the company. It’s amazing to me that the basic design of apple.com as it stands today is the same as it was in 1998 — how’s that for consistency?

But what would Apple’s home page have looked like in the years prior to 1996? Sadly we never got to see an apple.com home page for the launch of the Apple I, Apple II, Lisa, Macintosh or MessagePad… until today! Dave Lawrence of Newton Poetry fame posted a couple of mock-up apple.com home pages for the Lisa and MessagePad machines on his weblog and Matt Pearce answered Lawrence’s call for others to add to the meme. Between them, they’ve come up with a few beautifully crafted and clever images of the home pages that might have been.
Continue Reading…

What really set the original Amiga 1000 apart from the comparatively weak computers of the day, aside from its light-weight, multitasking operating system, was the set of custom chips that allowed the machine to deliver stunning graphics, full-screen animation, and high-quality, sampled, stereo audio — firsts, on all fronts. Today, every PC has “custom chips” driving their graphics and audio. Any modern Amiga utilizes such technologies as a matter of course. What sets the AmigaOne X1000 apart from the rest is its use of customizable co-processors.

Netbooks are the endpoint of four decades of computing — the final, ubiquitous manifestation of “A PC on every desk and in every home”. But netbooks are more than just PCs. If the Internet is the ultimate force of democratization in the world, then netbooks are the instrument by which that democracy will be achieved.

Your server doesn’t scale. Or, if you have a bigger site, then your servers (plural) don’t scale. They don’t scale ever. Servers in a classical sense are physical devices. They are made of up hardware components, and each of those components has an ability to do some task at some speed, and that’s it. Nothing anywhere gains any sort of capacity in response to the amount of stuff it’s being asked to do. It’s not scaling, and it’s never going to.

Spacewar! was one of the first video games and in 1972, Rolling Stone magazine sent Stewart Brand — 33 years old at the time — to document the early days of computing as entertainment. The photographs were taken by a young Annie Leibovitz (23). Play the original 1962 game code running on a PDP-1 emulator in your Java-enabled browser. [via]

Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks each day, every day from around the web and a special How-To hack each week.

Trust me, you will feel the performance difference of a modern SSD in day to day computing. That’s far more than I can say for most of today’s CPU and memory upgrades. The transition from magnetic storage to solid state storage is nothing less than a breakthrough. It’s already transformative; I can only imagine how fast, cheap, and large these drives are going to be in a few years. If you’ve ever wondered what performance would be like if everything was in RAM all the time — well, we just got one step closer to that.