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iPad 3 RAM doubled to 1GB, battery life to remain about the same

The third-generation iPad may look fairly identical to its predecessor, but it’s what’s inside that counts.

Though the new A5X chip in Apple’s third-generation iPad features the same dual-core CPU found in its predecessor, the system-on-a-chip is still believed to double the onboard RAM to 1 gigabyte.

Although Apple has never announced the amount of RAM built into any iPad or iPhone, preferring to focus less on technical specifications and more on the abilities of a devicea source who spoke with The Verge said the new A5X processor found in the latest iPad will, in fact, feature a gigabyte of RAM.

This amount doubles the 512MB of RAM found on the iPad 2 and says something about the iPad 3’s new battery, as RAM limitations in previous chips were said to be driven by battery life concerns. Last October, Microsoft explained that RAM is constantly consuming power, so the more memory that is included with a system, the less battery life it gets.

Reports first surfaced ahead of Apple’s iPad unveiling that Apple would increase the RAM in its custom processor. The information was derived from alleged iPad debug photos that leaked last month.

The new A5X processor features a dual-core CPU, the same as the A5. But its performance has been boosted by a new quad-core graphics processor that Apple says is twice as fast as the Nvidia Tegra 3 while offering four times the performance.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.