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chipworks

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

Tearing down the Microsoft Kin

While others have torn down the Kin in their reviews, the folks at Chipworks have done an actual teardown of the Microsoft smartphone.

For those who missed it, the Kin is Microsoft's effort to tailor a phone to the always-connected crowd. The device comes in two flavors, the squat, squarish Kin One and the longer, slightly more powerful Kin Two. The phone was developed and designed by Microsoft, manufactured by Sharp, and is sold in the U.S. on Verizon's network. It runs a variant of Windows Mobile, though not quite the same version being used in the … Read more