As is usual with Apple, they’ve not mentioned the amount of RAM in iPhone 4S at either the Let’s Talk iPhone event or in the specs online. Rumors have suggested it has 1GB of RAM but it appears that it may only have 512MB, the same amount as the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2. The information comes from an interview with Chair Entertainment’s creative director Donald Mustard who had been involved in the development of Infinity Blade 2 demo shown off at the event.

I’m still shocked that, with the iPhone 4S, I’m literally running around with a 1080p video camera in my pocket, with an eight megapixel camera, 64GB of hard drive space and an A5 chip with 512MB of memory. This is a really powerful computer, right?

Source: Eurogamer via This is my next

As you can see from the video above, the iPad 2 using the Apple A5 chip combined with more RAM performs much better than the original iPad when browsing in Mobile Safari. If you load up all nine tabs, you’ll see that the original iPad starts to choke up pretty badly when compared to the iPad 2. This is due to the original iPad only coming with 256MB of RAM while iPad 2 comes packed with 512MB. (We hoped for as much as 1GB in the video before getting more test results back. Maybe next year!.)

The original iPad tends to “kill” background tabs whenever it runs out of available memory, which can get pretty annoying if you use the iPad primarily for web browsing. The iPad 2 performed flawlessly and had no hiccups when browsing. Also the dreaded “checkerboard effect” — where significant lag would occur before Safari could render the web page content — is nowhere to be found. Scrolling in Safari is smooth as butter, and gone are the days when switching between tabs meant loading the entire page from scratch.

The difference in performance is quite clear, and browsing on the iPad 2 is definitely a step up from the original iPad in every way. If you were able to pick up an iPad 2 then let us know your thoughts on RAM performance and how it compares to the first iPad in the comments below!

Just like the original iPad debuted with an Apple A4 chip, iPad 2 is coming with an Apple A5 chip. What does that mean? In typical fashion Apple has been short on details saying only that it’s dual-core, 1GHz, 2x faster for computational tasks and 9x faster for graphics, all while preserving the 10 hour battery life that made the A4 famous. They don’t think we need to worry about what CPU or GPU they’re using and how much RAM is on board to let that power breathe. But here’s the thing — many of us want to know exactly that.

This is the chip that will also power the 2011 iPhone 5, iPod touch 5, and Apple TV. We want answers. We can handle answers! So… stick with us after the break for everything we know about the new Apple A5 chip… and what we can guess.

CPU

Here’s what Apple has to say about the new dual-core CPU:

Two powerful cores in one A5 chip mean iPad can do twice the work at once. You’ll notice the difference when you’re surfing the web, watching movies, making FaceTime video calls, gaming, and going from app to app to app. Multitasking is smoother, apps load faster, and everything just works better.

iPad, like all iOS devices is ARM-based. The original iPad used a single core Cortex A8 processor sped up to 1GHz, presumably by the geniuses at Intrisity — a company Apple subsequently acquired. Apple is still a massive ARM licensee and the successor to the Cortex A8 is the multicore Cortex A9. This chip is forming the heart iPad competitors and it makes sense that Apple is using it in iPad 2 as well.

The Cortex A9 can scale upwards of 2GHz and while some may be disappointed Apple is sticking to 1GHz for iPad 2 there are always trade offs to be made, including temperature and most importantly — battery life. If 2 times 1GHz cores are enough to give Apple the performance they want, the flexibility to do things like driving the iPad with one core and the HDMI-out display mirroring with the other, and keep 10 hours of battery life, that’s a huge win.

UPDATE: It could also be dual ARM Cortex A8 cores.

GPU

And here’s Apple on their new graphics performance:

With up to nine times the graphics performance, gameplay on iPad is even smoother and more realistic. And faster graphics help apps perform better — especially those with video. You’ll see it when you’re scrolling through your photo library, editing video with iMovie, and viewing animations in Keynote.

Apple has been using Imagination’s PowerVR GPU’s in iOS and since they own a stake in the company that’s also unlikely to change. The latest generation PowerVR SGX543 is a likely candidate here, perhaps dual core as well. Apple is not only pushing tons of pixels for video and gaming on-device, but offering up to 1080p out as well. 9x graphics performance is a big claim, but this chip with its OpenGL 3.2 support is big enough to match it.

It will also be interesting to see if Apple is using their own OpenCL in A5, which lets the GPU help out the CPU when it’s not otherwise engaged.

RAM

Apple doesn’t talk about RAM in iOS devices. Not ever. The original iPad had an anemic 256 MB of RAM. That wasn’t even enough to keep a few Safari pages in memory. iPhone 4 has 512 MB and wild internet rumors aside, that’s the minimum we should see in iPad 2.

Competing tablets are going to ship with 1GB of RAM and it would be great to see Apple match that but given the economics of hitting a $499 price point, they’ll try to get the most performance they can out of the least hardware they can so I’m not getting my hopes up.

Battery life

Hey, it’s still phenomenal:

Even with the new thinner and lighter design, iPad has the same amazing 10-hour battery life.1 That’s enough juice for one flight across the ocean, or one movie-watching all-nighter, or a week’s commute across town. The power-efficient A5 chip and iOS keep battery life from fading away, so you can get carried away.

And Apple’s making it a huge priority, which again means balancing out multiple cores, cycles, and memory with power efficiency.

The tear-down will tell

Apple won’t be talking about A5 in detail any time soon, so we’ll have to wait for March 11 and the iPad 2 to ship before it gets torn down and we find out for sure. Until then, those are my best guesses. What are yours?

The frenzied folks over at iFixit have torn down the iPod touch 4 and the big news — or rather small news — is that it only has 256MB of RAM, the same as the iPad and iPhone 3GS, but half what the iPhone 4 has.

Along with the tiny .7mp camera, lack of IPS display, and lack of a 128GB option, this feels like a cost-savings measure by Apple.

An unsubsidized iPhone 4 will run you over $600 or $700. No one would pay that for an iPod touch, so are lower specs worth the lower price?

The almost forgotten Zune HD aside, iPod touch pretty much has its product category to itself. However, as we start seeing 7-inch and smaller “tablets” start to hit the market, the iPod touch begins to compete with them as well. Being relatively cheap is a huge advantage there, probably as much as access to the iTunes App Store is.

What do you think? 256MB a deal-breaker for anyone? Last straw? Or still not an issue at that price?

[iFixit]

As expected, the moment Apple’s new iPhone 4 hit the streets, iFixit nabbed it, took it back to the lab, and proceeded with an iPhone 4 teardown. Especially exciting:

We have confirmed that the iPhone’s A4 processor has 512 MB RAM, unlike the iPad’s more limited 256 MB. This decision may have been made fairly late in Apple’s development cycle, because early leaked prototype phones only had 256 MB.

UPDATE: Looks like the Retina Display may indeed be protected by Gorilla Glass!

The front glass panel of the iPhone is constructed of Corning Gorilla Glass, a chemically strengthened alkali-aluminosilicate thin sheet glass that is reported to be 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic.

Gorilla Glass holds many advantages as the iPhone 4′s front panel including its high resistance to wear and increased strength from a strengthening process.

The teardown is still underway and we’ll update when they’re done, but in the meantime you can catch the action via the link below.

[iFixit]

TiPb first heard rumors that iPhone 4 would finally beef up onboard RAM to 512MB back in January and it looks like those rumors are now being confirmed via information given out during the WWDC Advanced Performance Optimization Session.

Why does RAM matter? Going from 256 to 512MB of RAM let the Palm Pre go from multitasking a handful of apps to well over 50. That’s why RAM matters.

The iPhone 3GS and iPad are snappy at 256MB. iPhone 4 at 512MB should — to quote Steve Jobs — should be a real screamer. Especially if iMovie is the kind of app we can expect to see more of. Glad Apple rose to the occasion.

[MacRumors via @justin_horn]

iFixit has performed their traditional tear-down of new Apple gear, this time taking the iPad apart piece by gloriously crafted piece, and here’s what they found:

The iPad’s battery has 5.5x 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 rear case is machined from a single billet of aluminum, increasing weight but greatly improving the rigidity of the device.

The empty void in the upper right corner is where the cellular communications board would go in the 3G iPad.

The A4 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 two memory modules in the other package. They’re all sandwiched together in a very nice and thin PoP.

The iPad RAM is INSIDE the A4 processor package. Confirming this took quite a bit of sleuthing: we had to partner with Chipworks to X-ray the processor. The X-ray revealed two layers of RAM. In addition to the ARM processor, the A4 package contains two stacked Samsung dies.

We will be releasing a detailed analysis of the A4 in conjunction with Chipworks in a few days.

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 is necessitated by the panel’s large size.

The touch circuit design is more similar to the old 2G and early 3G iPhones than the current 3GS. Chipworks informed us 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.”

Disappointingly, especially for those hoping for iPhone 4.0 multitasking miracles, Furbo.org tests show iPad is using the same 256MB of RAM as the iPhone 3GS. We were hoping for me — as in double. If true, there are other ways to handle the demands of multiple apps, but there’s no such thing as too much RAM when we’re still talking MBs…

On the last iPhone Live!, Dieter, Phil and I discussed iPhone 4.0 and whether, as rumors suggest, we’d finally see multitasking brought to the platform. That’s when the discussion turned to RAM. The iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G have an anemic 128MB of RAM. The iPhone 3GS has 256MB. That’s the same amount as the original Palm Pre and Motorola Droid, which do multitask but do bog down and sometimes error out while doing it. Just-released phones like the Palm Pre Plus and Google Android Nexus One up the ante to a beefy 512MB of RAM.

What does this have to do with the iPhone and multitasking? We’ve seen time and time again that Apple would rather not offer a feature at all then offer one with a poor user experience. It’s why we waited for copy and paste until iPhone 3.0, and why the iPhone 3GS does 30fps video recording and even though the iPhone 3G could do half that, maybe, Apple won’t enable it.

When Push Notification was announced, head of iPhone software Scott Forstall made fun of Windows Mobile-style task management on a mobile device, and sighted battery drain as the primary reason Apple wasn’t doing it. Let’s assume Apple gets better battery life in the 4th generation iPhone as well, unless they get more RAM, it’s still tough to see them enabling multitasking unless and until they beef up the RAM so that at least a few apps can run in the background with as much smoothness and reliability as Apple demands.

Will iPhone 2G get another free update to iPhone 4.0 when it’s released? Will it get the full update, unlike 3.0 when it didn’t get MMS or A2DP. Will iPhone 3G, when it didn’t get video recording? Will iPhone 3GS?

If RAM is the thing that will dictate iPhone multitasking, 512MB (or more?) might just be the magic number, and potentially the magic cut off (or scale back) as well.

tap tap tap points out something that perhaps should have been obvious from the start regarding the iPhone 3GS‘ 256MB of RAM — that doubling the memory, once the OS loads and programs start eating away at it, often leaves more than double the free space.

The older iPhone models have been often considered underpowered when it comes to RAM, so even though the RAM amount is technically doubled, in actual use, you’ll often be working with 4x to 10x the amount of free RAM. And that’s one major aspect that’s contributing to the overall speedier feel of the 3GS.

As we saw in our video iPhone 3GS vs. iPhone 3G app launch smackdown, this translates directly into keeping Mobile Safari pages loaded, for example, when you exit out, load a large app, and then come back.

Two iPhones, 6 apps. We know the iPhone 3G S is supposed to be “on average” 2x faster than the iPhone 3G, but stats are stats and what we’re interested in is real-world usage. A few seconds here, a dozen or more there, and all of a sudden they add up to minutes.

In this video we launch apps on each iPhone 3.0 device at the same time, but imagine if every time the iPhone 3G S finished first, we immediately launched the next app. We wouldn’t make you sit through that much iPhone 3G lag, but that makes the point.

Also, we put a few webpages into Safari, then launched a heavy app, waited for it to load, then exited and went back to Safari to see how many would still be in memory.

Let’s just say, double the RAM makes more than double the difference…

T-Mobile Netherlands (via Wired) has let slip the formerly elusive specs for the iPhone 3G S:

• 256MB of RAM
• 600Mhz CPU

Anandtech (via Macrumors) gives further info:

Although unannounced, the iPhone 3GS uses (again) a Samsung SoC but this time instead of the ARM11 + MBX-Lite combo it’s got a Cortex A8 and PowerVR SGX; just like the [Palm] Pre.

So add that to the fast PowerVR SGX graphics core, and — to quote Steve Jobs — it’s a screamer!

Update: Apple Insider has a great run down of the technology inside the chipsets.

Apple is perhaps the most gluttonous consumer of flash RAM chips on the planet, what with most iPod’s flash memory based and still selling in the multiple tens of millions and — oh yeah — the iPhone and iPod touch. 14 million iPhone 3Gs were sold last year alone and this year? According to Apple Insider, they’s waddled the chair up and parked it right at the buffet:

The iPhone maker has bought out Samsung’s entire available supply, putting the world’s largest producer of flash memory on allocation until April 2009, according to the report. Samsung makes just over 40% of the world’s NAND Flash RAM.

There was no indication, however, whether or not Apple has switched to the double-capacity chips they’ll need to take the iPhone to 32GB. Due to the communications radios, previous iPhones have only 1 RAM slot as opposed the 2 in the iPod touch.

But we kind of want 32GB in our iPhones, right?