Evidence of Apple chip design change in iPad teardown
Apple has changed the design of the main chip in the new iPad with tweaks to accommodate a higher-performing chip, according to teardown analysis. That would be necessary, of course, to drive that pixel-dense screen.
There are two significant changes:
Separate DRAM: Apple's A5X chip package does not "stack" system memory (aka, SDRAM), like the A5 did in the iPad 2, as seen in an analysis by Chipworks. Instead, the DRAM resides in "discrete" devices, according to Anandtech. And note that the new iPad has 1GB of memory. The iPad 2 had half that much. … Read more