"We really want to wait until we know a little more about what's inside," said Andrew Rassweiler, the director of iSuppli's teardown services. "We'd rather not just throw numbers at it yet."

Even so, iSuppli has come to some preliminary conclusions about the iPad. "It does seem like a gigantic iPod Touch," said Rassweiler, "which means that although some costs would just scale up from the iPod, like the display and the touch screen, a lot won't." The iPad components that provide WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS, for example, will likely be the same parts used in the iPod Touch.

Rassweiler will be conducting an iPad teardown as soon as Apple ships the tablet, which is slated for late March.

Among the mysteries he hopes to solve then is what powers the iPad.

Apple has acknowledged that the iPad contains Apple-designed silicon, which it's labeled an Apple A4 chip, but hasn't confirmed what most analysts assume -- that the A4 was created by , the Santa Clara, Calif., boutique microprocessor design company Apple acquired in 2008. The Apple A4, said Aaron Vronko, CEO of Rapid Repair, a firm that services Apple's mobile hardware, is actually a that almost certainly includes the a single-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor running at 1 GHz.