By Jon Stokes, Ars Technica
Most companies, when they go to the enormous expense of designing a complex chip, tell everyone about it. Even a company like Sun or IBM, whose chips are used only in their own computers, unveil the details of their new processors well before products based on those new parts come to market. This is true for game consoles, for SoCs of all flavors, for PC chips, and for most of the rest of the semiconductor industry. It’s not, however, true for Apple.

Since the unveiling of the iPad last month, all the public has learned about the application processor that powers the device is a two-letter name: A4. The rest of the details have been treated as Top Secret, and this secrecy has stoked plenty of speculation, some of it reasonable and some of it completely and totally unhinged.

Why has Apple been so secretive about the A4? Why hasn’t the company presented a paper on the device at ISSCC, or published a whitepaper?

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