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Apr 03

iPad Dissection Reveals Its Secret Powers

Posted in: Apple, ipad, Media Players, teardown, Today's Chili

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Before many of us even had a chance to buy an iPad, teardown company iFixit dissected one and analyzed its innards.

Tearing apart the iPad was a 31-step process, and a look inside reveals some interesting insights. The highlights are as follows, courtesy of iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens:

The iPad’s battery has five times the capacity of the battery in the iPhone. The iPad actually has two batteries wired in parallel, for a total of 24.8 Watt-hours.
On average, the iPad sips just 2.5 Watts. That’s 1/5 the power of a compact fluorescent bulb!
The A4 processor is a Package-on-Package (PoP), with at least three layers of circuitry layered on top of each other. A4 is packaged just like the iPhone processors, microprocessor in one package and 2 DRAMs in the other package. They’re all sandwiched together in a very nice and thin PoP.
The iPad has 512 MB RAM inside the A4 processor package. iFixit had to X-Ray the processor to confirm this. The X-Ray revealed two layers of RAM. In addition to the ARM processor, the A4 package contains two stacked 256 MB Samsung K4 SDRAM dies.
The rumored slot for a camera is actually taken up by the ambient light sensor.
The glass panel is quite thick: about 1.18 mm, compared to the iPhone’s 1.02 mm thick glass. This ensures durability with the panel’s large size.
The touch circuit design is more similar to the old 2G and early 3G iPhones than the current 3GS. Chip analysis firm Chipworks told iFixit that “there is so much room in the iPad that Apple didn’t need to use small chips, just the right ones and cheap ones.”

These tidbits of information added together explain just how the iPad gets such epically long battery life (12 hours, according to some tests) and incredible speed. From our testing today, the iPad is surprisingly fast, especially with Google Maps’ street view and web browsing, and we’ve barely even dented the battery.

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