ARM's Cortex A9 arrives just in time for the Apple tablet
Apple's product motto could be similar to the old wine commercial "We will sell no wine before its time". Apple has been waiting for processing power/watt to come to a point where you can do interesting things on a tablet yet it doesn't run out of electricity in a few hours.
Sources told the NYTimes in October that Steve Jobs wouldn't build the tablet with lackluster performance and low battery life.
“It couldn’t be built. The battery life wasn’t long enough, the graphics performance was not enough to do anything and the components themselves cost more than $500,” said Joshua A. Strickland, a former Apple engineer whose name is on several of the company’s patents for multitouch technology.
If you've been following CES, you'll know the star of the show was ARM's Cortex A9 processor which showed itself with designs from Qualcomm, Broadcom and NVidia with products being released by Boxee and others based on these processors.
These Cortex A9 level chips are orders of magnitude faster than Intel's Atom family of processors, yet at the same time consume less power.
I believe this level of processor will be in the tablet, which it is made by Qualcomm, Nvidia, Apple's current ARM partner, Samsung or Apple's subsidiary PA Semi.
Now that the technology is mature (like a good grape?) Apple can go to market with the product. Perhaps their motto could be: "We will sell no product before its time"
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