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    iFixit begins disassembling the new iPad, reveals Samsung-built LCD and processor on board

    iFixit begins disassembling the new iPad, reveals Samsung-built LCD and processor on board

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    We knew it was coming, but iFixit has finally received a shiny new iPad (with LTE) to dissect.

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    iFixit A5x
    iFixit A5x

    We knew it was coming, but iFixit has finally received a shiny new iPad (with LTE) to dissect. That teardown is going on right now — we're looking forward to finding out for sure that the new iPad includes 1GB of RAM (though benchmarks have already tipped us off to that), and iFixit already believes that the LCD is made by Samsung, based on the model numbers. A careful look at the battery label reveals that it's a 43Whr battery with an 11,560mAh capacity — despite Apple's site listing it as a 42.5Whr battery. The battery consists of three 12.5cm x 6.5cm cells, each 4mm thick, and spans almost the entire width and breadth of the iPad. Curiously, each of the cells are labelled as 14.6Whr, which gives another rating of 43.8Whr — confusing stuff. Battery density looks to be almost identical to that of the unit found in the iPad 2 — it's the huge size of the new cells that's made the difference here.

    As iFixit got deeper, they uncovered a few more interesting details in the guts of the new iPad. The logic board, it looks like, has a Broadcom BCM4330 802.11a/b/g/n MAC/Baseband/Radio that includes an Integrated Bluetooth 4.0+HS and FM Transceiver; they also uncovered the new A5X SoC itself, which looks to be manufactured by Samsung like the A4 and A5. In terms of RAM, you have a pair of 4Gb Elpida LPDDR2 cards for a total of 1GB of DRAM arranged in a 64-bit configuration. There's also a Qualcomm MDM9600 3G and 4G wireless modem (not the newer MDM9615) and the Qualcomm RTR8600 multi-band/mode RF transceiver for 3G and LTE. The final piece of the puzzle is provided by Toshiba: 16GB of NAND flash memory. It looks as though the teardown is finished for now, but we'll update this article with more information if and when it appears.

    Aaron Souppouris and Adi Robertson contributed to this report.