Inside Apple iPad: Multitasking and multiprocessing

“Apple’s new iPad is being criticized for lacking the capacity to run multiple third party applications at once, but the company has a variety of options to pursue in addressing the issue,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.

“The iPad’s iPhone OS arbitrarily limits third party apps from running in the background after the user closes the app. But this isn’t because the iPhone OS ‘can’t multitask,’ as the iPhone OS uses the same preemptively multitasking Mach/BSD kernel as Apple’s desktop Mac OS X,” Dilger reports. “The iPhone OS is constantly running system processes that listen to the mobile network for incoming calls and texts, it runs an iPod process for playing back music all the time, it watches for background notifications being sent to idle apps, and there’s a variety of other things always going on. This is the definition of multitasking.”

Dilger reports, “The iPhone OS inside the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad is not only capable of this style of preemptive multitasking, but also employs multiprocessing, which allows different tasks to run concurrently on different processor cores… Apple’s secretive A4 processor in the iPad is actually a System on a Chip that incorporates multiple processor cores, each of which can handle simultaneous tasks.”

Dilger reports, “The final release of the iPad will undoubtedly introduce additional features that weren’t included in the initial presentation, just as the iPhone was released with features that weren’t announced at its original introduction… Developers are already privy to a variety of iPad features that have not yet been publicly advertised by Apple.”

Much more in the full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews