UBM Technologies has posted a wealth of new information based on a teardown of Apple's iPad 2, including new research that sheds a little more light on Apple's brand-new A5 chip.
First, a bit of background: The A5, successor to Apple's A4 line of chips that powered such devices as the first-generation iPad, the iPhone 4, and the second-generation Apple TV, is a system-on-a-chip design. By that, we mean that the package itself contains both a dual-core CPU and GPU—the former, claims Apple, is double the speed of its single-core, ARM Cortex A8 predecessor. And the latter? Allegedly up to nine times faster than the PowerVR GPU bundled within the A4.
Interestingly, the A5's Cortex A9 CPU doesn't actually run at a sustained 1-GHz speed. Unlike its predecessor, Apple's A5 chip dynamically adjusts the processor's speed depending on the application that's pulled up within iOS.
"This would indicate an advanced power management circuitry controlling the clock speeds of the cores—something new for the A5 and may explain the use of a different power management IC from Dialog Semiconductor," says Allan Yogasingam, UBM engineer and technical marketing manager, in an interview with AppleInsider.
UBM also claims that the chip is manufactured by Samsung, based on an analysis of the font on the A5 itself as well as a cross-section comparison of the A5 and other 45-nanomenter chips in the company's database. Within the A5 that's bundled inside Apple's iPad 2 is also the debut of Samsung's new 42-nanometer LPDDR2 memory—all of 512 megabytes in total. In contrast, the A4 chip used within Apple's original A4 only came with 256 megabytes of LPDDR memory.
According to UBM, the A5 chip—slightly larger in size than Apple's A4—costs approximately $25 to make. And compared to its rivals in the chip marketplace, UBM claims that the A5 is approximately $10 more expensive to make than Nvidia's Tegra 2.
In total, UBM estimates that the iPad 2—the 32-gigabyte version with 3G—costs approximately $270 to build. That's all of $18 less than the company's estimate of the cost of building a single Motorola Xoom, same storage size. If accurate, then Apple is churning a profit of, at most, $459 for each 32GB device, minus any extra costs (marketing, labor, distribution, etc.) built into the price of the device. That figure also doesn't account for any differences that might show up in the AT&T version of the iPad 2 versus the Verizon version, or vice versa.
That number is nevertheless a bit off from the most recent figures from iSuppli, which put the iPad 2's total cost of construction at anywhere from $323 to $326, depending on whether it's an AT&T or a Verizon variant of the iPad 2. It's also important to note that iSuppli puts the cost of the A5 chip at a solid $14, which would make it roughly equal in cost to Nvidia's Tegra 2.