The Frequency of Apple A5X in the New iPad Confirmed: Still Running at 1GHz
by Kristian Vättö on March 13, 2012 12:02 PM ESTWhile Apple's new iPad won't be available until Friday, some users have gotten their hands on the new models and done some preliminary benchmarks. A Vietnamese site, tinhte.vn, posted a screenshot of GeekBench running on the new iPad (model iPad3,3) which showed a score of 756 and a 1.00GHz ARMv7 processor. For comparison, the GeekBench score of iPad 2 is 751, which confirms that the GeekBench reading of the frequency is indeed correct.
Image courtesy of tinhte.vn
In a nutshell, the processor in A5X is largely the same as in A5: We are looking at two Cortex-A9 cores running at up to 1.0GHz. Some people were anticipating an increase in the clock speed as A5X is expected to be 32nm while A5 was based on older 45nm process node, but it appears that Apple used all the gains of a smaller process node for better graphics.
The GeekBench screenshot also confirms 1GB of RAM, although that was fairly certain even before the release thanks to leaked screenshots.
The GPU, especially its frequency, is still a mystery but hopefully we will be able to get our hands on the new iPad as soon as possible and start testing.
Source: Tinhte.vn
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zorxd - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
In that case they should have made 2 GHz+ single core CPUs instead of dual and quad core.There might not be a lot of multithreaded programs right now in the mobile space, but except if you change your tablet every 6 months you probably want it to be future proof a little. It's no different than desktop PCs. At first we had single, dual, and now quad or even more cores. It's just a matter of time. However it is true that if Nvidia is the only quad-core maker this year this could slow things down a little.
ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
The issue is that even most desktop programs including games barely make use of 4 cores even after all this time. I doubt the situation will be better for tablets in the near term, ie. the lifespan of a Tegra 3 tablet.Just as for desktops, going from 1 to 2 cores made a lot of sense because even without multithreaded apps or multiple apps, 2 cores are useful because background tasks can be shuffled to the 2nd core allowing the foreground program to run uninterrupted on the 1st core. Going from dual to quad core however sees diminishing returns without some work on the developers part.
zorxd - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Well again if I had to choose between a quad 1.3 GHz or a dual 2.6, the later wins hands down.It will be interesting to see more dual 1.5 GHz krait vs quad 1.3 GHz Cortex A9
name99 - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Just stop it dude. You are embarrassing yourself.
Remember that kid with the lightsaber on YouTube? That's where you're headed...
metafor - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
How so? Multiple tabs can be multithreaded easily but that's more of a user behavior study rather than a computational study.Many of the computationally intensive components of parsing a webpage aren't really thread-friendly. Namely, javascript and html parsing. You can argue that a single page contains so many different snippets that you can parse them individually in parallel, but the problem becomes that the overhead required to fill the cache and start parsing would eclipse the processing time of most scriptlets. This makes loading them onto multiple cores impractical and not really beneficial.
There may very well be webpages that do benefit tremendously from multiple cores. But thus far, we've not seen them.
I agree with Tegra 3's CPU, even in single-threaded cases such as webpage parsing and rendering, being faster than the A5X (albeit from page load times, I'd say Krait does far better). But Apple obviously thinks iPad 2 level webpage performance is beyond the point of being perceived to be "slow" by the end-user that they don't think it needs to be faster, at least for now.
How true that is will depend entirely on the user and the typical webpage they go to, obviously.
zorxd - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Many web sites seems to include animated GIFs (mainly for advertisement) now that Flash isn't really popular on mobile devices. I guess cores can be dedicated to that while others render each web page frames.metafor - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
How much overhead do you think an animated gif takes? Have you profiled one? You know that other than the initial decoding, it doesn't really take much if any of the cpu....Hell, even the decode of a gif is a blip on the radar.
The redraw can be a function of the cpu but unless the browser renders the page in frames with multiple redraw windows, that task is probably better left to the GPU and is backcache.
zorxd - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
All I know is that browsing on a desktop PC is still much faster than on tablet, no matter what GPU sits in your PC.So there is still room for much faster browsing on tablets and faster CPU is the key.
Now maybe not everything can be threaded so in that case we will need higher clock speeds and better architectures.
metafor - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
I would look more towards the browser. An iPad does about as well (better in many cases) than IE does on my laptop.Chrome, of course, flies past them all.
But again, there's a point of diminishing return. Apple obviously feels that battery life takes precedence over the benefits of instant vs half a second when it comes to rendering a page.
zorxd - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
I don't use IE often but I am pretty sure that it is faster than an iPad by a big margin