Thursday, January 28, 2010

Brains of the iPad

There's very little definitively known about the 1 GHz Apple A4 CPU, other than it's an ARM CPU. Rumor is that it's Apple's customized version of the Cortex A9, the first multicore ARM chip. If it's a dual-core 1 GHz chip, it could easily have 3x the processing power of the iPhone's 600 MHz (or so) CPU.

No wonder everyone raves about how fast the iPad is compared to the iPhone and iPod touch!

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Firefox 3.7 and Tiger

Firefox 3.6 went final last Friday, so I'm moving to that at my "regular" version of Firefox, replacing 3.5. I've been using the 3.6 Namoroka PowerPC G4 build for some time, and it's been very stable.

I wanted to put the 3.7 alpha on my Power Macs and soon discovered that it won't launch on Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" - it apparently requires 10.5 "Leopard" or later. That's a shame, as Tiger remains a great operating system and meets almost all of my needs. (Ditto for Leopard, which doesn't support Classic Mode. That's why I use two Macs side by side.)

Camino 2.0.1 remains my primary browser, with the PowerPC build of Firefox 3.7 playing second fiddle. I also use Opera 10 and Safari now and then.