The New iPad vs. ASUS' Transformer Pad Infinity in Specs

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• tayb - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

  I disagree. The dual core Cortex A9 is plenty fast to run the OS and any of the applications but at those resolutions a fast GPU becomes much more important. Most of the things you do on an iPad are visual anyway. There is a reason Apple is focusing on powerful GPUs.

• zorxd - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

  Let see...
  
  Facebook
  Browsing
  Youtube
  Chat
  Twitter
  Email
  Music
  Calendar
  Movies
  Angry birds
  
  None of these are graphic intensive and is probably 95% of what people are doing on tablet. You need a little GPU power to decode 1080p h264 but the iPad2 was more than fast enough for this. On the other hand a faster CPU helps you doing all this stuff faster (faster application launch, etc.). Having a faster GPU won't play your 1080p movie faster. The only case where it helps is in 3D games. This is the same GPU used in the Playstation Vita, a gaming device.
  
  The iPhone 4 had a slow GPU for its resolution and nobody really cared. The next iPad will have a faster CPU.
  GPU will probably reach a ceiling at some point, just like on PCs where most people don't care about it, and prefer saving $100 even if it mean having 10x slower graphics.

• hackbod - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

  When you are talking about these screen resolutions, the GPU is *tremendously* important. And the part of that which is really REALLY important is the memory bandwidth of the GPU.
  
  Just think: a 2048x1536 display is 12MB for a single frame buffer! When you are looking the memory bandwidth of these devices, you are talking about how many times it can touch each pixel at 60fps, and this number end up being a small integer (often very small).
  
  So, to scroll a list in one of your non-GPU-intensive simple applications, you need to touch almost every pixel at least two times, maybe a third time to composite to the display, and add any fancy layering and you are hitting them a few more times. You quickly hit the point where you are saturating the memory buss and can't hit 60fps scrolling no matter what you do.

• hackbod - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

  Btw, the more limited GPU of the original iPad is why it updated the display at 30fps.

• harbourcoat - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

  well the iPad3 has to shift >1mpx more on screen than the infinity. so that 4x advantage is diluted in the wash.

• stktheft - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

  I hope you do know that the Infinity GPU is 12 core ( as opposed to the iPad's 4 core)
  
  The Infinity CPU on wifi only model is 4 core, iPad is 2 core. On the face of it, there is no way iPad would outperform the Infinity. Lets wait and see though

• Greg512 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link

  Certainly the Infinity will be faster CPU-wise, but I wouldn't be so confident about the GPU side of the equation. Cores don't mean much when comparing different architectures. After all, a GPU can have hundreds of 'cores,' but they are not equivalent to cores found in Intel and AMD processors. It seems to me the new iPad will enjoy a sizable graphics advantage over its competition, given that Tegra 3 did not greatly outperform the iPad 2 in terms of graphics.

• ImSpartacus - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

  I think they might be talking about graphics performance. Apple has always placed more emphasis on graphics performance than CPU performance. Their CPU cores are always underclocked and their GPUs are always enormous, so nothing has really changed.

• zorxd - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

  What has changed is that Apple now puts even more emphasis on the GPU.
  Also the iPhone 4 had a relatively weak GPU for the time.

• michael2k - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

  Anand has already published numbers showing the Tegra 3 is roughly equivalent to last year's A5 CPU.
  
  If they added 4 GPUs per core (for 8 cores), then it probably is 4 times faster, at least with regards to the GPU.