When Apple launched the new iPad a few weeks ago, it kept the iPad 2 on sale, and cut the price to £329. It was a smart move and one of the factors which helped the iPad increase its share of the tablet market significantly last quarter.
It was assumed that the iPad 2 on sale now was identical to the one which has been selling for the last year. But a clever piece of detective work from the guys at Anandtech has shown that not to be the case.
The newly manufactured versions of the iPad 2, or at least some batches of them, feature a 32nm A5 system-on-a-chip, rather than a 45nm SOC. The main benefit of that for us is substantially longer battery life.
There’s another benefit, however, for Apple – the ability to test the 32nm SOC on a relatively low volume product.
Apple decided to try out Samsung’s 32nm HK+MG process on the A5 used in the 3rd generation Apple TV and some of the new iPad 2s. The former is a relatively low volume product for Apple, while the latter still moves in significant quantities. To deal with that fact, Apple is continuing to ship the original 45nm iPad 2,1 alongside the new 32nm iPad 2,4. Any hiccups in Samsung’s production of the A5 and there are still more than enough iPad 2,1s to go around. The risk of moving to 32nm is effectively mitigated, while the learnings Apple gains from building the 32nm A5 will pay off later this year as Apple ramps up production of a 32nm SoC for use in the next iPhone.
How do you know if you’ve got a 32nm iPad 2? Sadly, there’s no way to tell other than to run battery life tests, so you can’t specify it when you buy.
