As the initial excitement over Apple's iPad has faded, developers are now finding a more balanced attitude.

In particular, there's plenty of speculation concerning its exact hardware specification and how that will impact the sorts of applications and games that will work well on the device.

For example, one of the surprises of the announcement was Apple's use of its custom chip, the A4.

Beyond being ARM-based and clocked at 1 GHz, its components haven't been announced, although are widely assumed to involve an ARM Mali GPU rather than one of the Imagination Technologies' PowerVR SGX family, which powers the iPhone 3GS.

"The new GPU from the iPad, the Mali 55 has some great features like full screen anti-aliasing, which is definitely missing on iPhone. It also supports OpenGL ES 2.0 which means we can have nice pixel shaders to improve the lighting and post processing in games," says Thomas Lachartre of French developer Godzilab, who's been vocal in his views on the subject.

Bigger screen, bigger processor?

Of course, one of the key issues is how has the iPad's silicon been designed in terms of powering a screen that has four times the real estate of the iPhone and iPod touch, and giving a predicted 10 hour battery life?

""We don't really know about the performance of this GPU yet," Lachartre points out.

"The iPad has four to five time more pixels than the iPhone so you could assume the Mali has to have four or five times the performance than the iPhone's PowerVR to be able to run the same game at a resolution of 1024 x 768. Otherwise games might have to downgrade their shaders and models or their resolution to be able to run at 30 frames per second.

"As for vertex processing, this doesn't have to be hardware accelerated. It can be done on the CPU. The main worry is fillrate. There were hardware specs on ARM's website giving some performance figure for the Mali, but they have since been removed. They showed the Mali 55 had an eight of the fillrate of the PowerVR SGX 535.

"Of course, until you actually test the hardware, such figures are not completely reliable. We certainly hope they're not correct in terms of overall system performance."