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A new report asserts that the GPU unit that Apple baked into its A4 chip powering the iPad lacks full OpenGL ES 2.0 support, a major problem for games and allegedly the reason why the tablet won’t run Flash Player 10.1.
It was alleged that Steve Jobs criticized Adobe’s Flash technology in a morale-boosting meeting at Apple’s Cupertino campus after the iPad introduction. According to Valleywag, Jobs has also slammed Flash during a tour of the Wall Street Journal offices. Apple’s chief allegedly told the newspaper managing editors that running Flash video on the iPad would reduce battery life from the rated ten hours of video to a measly hour and a half. According to a post at Bright Side of News, the iPad’s supposedly sub-standard GPU core inside their custom 1GHz A4 chip is to blame for this.
The publication called the A4’s GPU part “less than stellar,” citing sources from the game industry who were given access to the pre-production iPad units in order to optimize their games. Those sources allegedly think that Apple’s couch computing device falls short in the graphics department:
According to our sources, the graphics subsystem of Apple’s A4 not just has issues in fully supporting OpenES 2.0 but is a underpowered GPU for the screen resolution at hand. iPad’s resolution is too high and as a consequence, A4’s GPU cannot accelerate Adobe Flash.
The publication wrote that Adobe worked closely with the chipset makers like Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments to ensure that the GPUs found in high-end smartphones help the Flash 10.1 player decode both the Flash Video and interactive content like games and animations. Bright Side of News recently made headlines with a piece quoting ARM’s CEO who publicly said that the A4 chip consists of an ARM CPU core, in addition to ARM’s GPU IP. The notion that Apple dumped Imagination’s GPU IP in favor of ARM’s was met with skepticism in the Apple community, but ARM did not dispute that report.
