Edible Apple

While some were disappointed that the original iPad only came with 256MB of RAM, those fears were quickly allayed once users got their hands on the device. With the speedy A4 processor in tow, sluggish performance was never an issue with the original iPad.

Apple of course isn’t prone to discuss technical specifications on its mobile products, focusing instead on the user experience. Still, that’s never stopped people from trying to figure out just what Apple is putting into its products. With the iPad 2 launch less than a week away, folks are now trying to discern if Apple upped the amount of RAM it uses on the next-gen iPad or if it’s staying with 256MB. Hell, even the iPhone 4 has 512MB of RAM so isn’t it high time the iPad join the party?

Gizmodo, not surprisingly, raised some eyebrows last week when it wrote that the iPad 2 only carriers 256MB of RAM. This report was subsequently squashed by semiconductor analyst Kakeun Lee who tweetedthat the iPad 2 does, in fact, come with 512 MB of RAM. Lee further wrote that the iPad 2 uses LPDDR2 RAM which is faster than the LLDDR1 RAM Apple used on the first-generation iPad.

Reports indicating that the iPad 2 would sport 512MB of RAM first surfacedin late January when analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote that in addition to more RAM, the iPad 2 would come with faster processing power and faster memory access.

Regarding the increase in RAM, Kuo explained: “For making full use of GPU upgrading advantage, iPad 2 needs bigger memory bandwidth. So iPad 2 has 512MB RAM, same as iPhone 4 and twice as much as iPad 1, but running at higher clock 1,066 MHz for getting bigger memory bandwidth (iPhone 4 memory clock is 800 MHz).”