Apple's new iPad will undoubtedly sell like hotcakes, but the new chip that powers it is already causing some consternation in the tech community. Or more precisely, the way Apple talked about its new dual-core A5X System-on-a-Chip (SoC) at this week's unveiling of the third-generation tablet has got a lot of folks scratching their heads.
Ahead of the new iPad launch, conflicting rumors held that Apple was readying either an upgraded dual-core chip or a full-blown quad-core SoC for its next-gen tablet. It turns out Apple sort of did both—the A5X has two central processor cores but it's also got four graphics cores.
Apple itself is officially advertising the new chip as a "dual-core" processor, following the traditional convention of using the number of CPU cores in a mobile SoC to define it as single-core, dual-core, quad-core, and so on. But the company seemingly wasn't quite as clear as it might have been about just what the new A5X chip is and isn't at Wednesday's new iPad curtain-raising—witness the various headlines and news reports touting Apple's new "quad-core" processor.
