We all know by now that the newly announced Apple iPad has a custom-designed Apple processor on the inside dubbed the “Apple A4”. More than a general purpose processor, the A4 is based on a “System-on-a-chip” (SoC) design integrating many other functionalities (including a graphics core, and memory controller) onto the same die.

That’s great and all but what I really want to know is – what exactly is at the heart of the A4? The video demonstrations we’ve seen thus far show the iPad to be a blazingly fast device. This not your average iPhone 3GS people.

Well according to an article over at HardwareCentral.com, the A4 is built around a derivative of the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore (multi-core processor) and utilizing an ARM GPU known as the Mali 50-Series. If you’re interested in knowing more about the Cortex-A9 MPCore, check out ARM’s webpage on the processor architecture here. You can read more about the Mali GPUs here.

Interestingly enough, the A4 should have additional headroom in terms of clock speed since the Cortex-A9 supports higher clock speeds. Many third party licensees have opted to stay at 1GHz since that appears to be the sweet spot between performance and thermals. You know the hackers out there will try to overclock this baby!

You can read more about the A4 and the iPad internals over at HardwareCentral.com.

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