NVIDIA Challenges Apple's iPad Benchmarks 198
MojoKid writes "At the iPad unveiling last week, Apple flashed up a slide claiming that the iPad 2 was 2x as fast as Nvidia's Tegra 3, while the new iPad would be 4x more powerful than Team Green's best tablet. NVIDIA's response boils down to: 'it's flattering to be compared to you, but how about a little data on which tests you ran and how you crunched the numbers?' NVIDIA is right to call Apple out on the meaningless nature of such a comparison, and the company is likely feeling a bit dogpiled given that TI was waving unverified webpage benchmarks around less than two weeks ago. That said, the Imagination Technologies (PowerVR) GPUs built into the iPad 2 and the new iPad both utilize tile-based rendering. In some ways, 2012 is a repeat of 2001 — memory bandwidth is at an absolute premium because adding more bandwidth has a direct impact on power consumption. The GPU inside NVIDIA's Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 is a traditional chip, which means it's subject to significant overdraw, especially at higher resolutions. Apple's comparisons may be bogus, but Tegra 3's bandwidth issue they indirectly point to aren't. It will be interesting to see NVIDIA's next move and what their rumored Tegra 3+ chip might bring."
Numbers are meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
Does using the tablet have smooth and instant responsiveness? At the end of the day, that's all that matters. Tegra 100 or ipad 100 won't matter if the OS that uses it isn't smooth and keeps up with the user interactions. Consumers just care about experience, how they get there isn't of interest to anyone other than nerds.
Re:This is funny. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry, Nvidia! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or ask Amazon: Amazon releases 'Kindle' e-reader device. His Steveness declares "Nobody reads". And now Apple is pushing books, newspapers, and their own pet proprietary publishing platform...
Cheer up, emo Nvidia, all you have to do is sell Apple a Tegra N SoC, or even just the rights to include your GPU in their AN SoC, and Tim Cook will personally explain to the world that PowerVR GPUs are slow, weak, make you 30% less creative and are produced entirely from conflict minerals.
Re:This is funny. (Score:5, Insightful)
One also has to consider that the older iPad 2 smeared the floor with the Tegra 3, why would they think that twice the performance is 'meaningless'? Considering Apple typically doesn't play too lose with the marketing statistics for metrics like battery life, real world performance, etc, then I don't find this to be a stretch. I will be interesting to see the real world benchmarks when the hardware arrives.
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Asus-Eee-Pad-Transformer-Prime-Preview/?page=7 [hothardware.com]
Re:This is funny. (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple's numbers make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
We recently saw a graphics benchmark of the A5 vs the Tegra3 posted to /., and the A5 beat the Tegra in real-world-ish benchmarks, and more than doubled it's score in fill rate. [hothardware.com]
The A5X is basically just the A5 with twice as many GPU cores, and graphics problems tend to be embarrassingly parallel, so unless it scales up really poorly with those extra cores (due to shared bandwidth limitations, or poor geometry scaling) it should have no problem beating the Tegra 3 by 2x, especially in terms of fill rate.
And when you quadruple the number of pixels on your screen, as Apple just did, which measurement matters? Fill rate.
who the hell cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
tegra smegma a5x tri-dual-octo-quad core ACME RX3200 Rocket Skates GigaHertzMegaPixelPerSecond my asshole graphics is irrelevant.
the ONLY thing that matters is how it works when its in your hands.
does it drive 2048x1536 at least as well as the ipad 2? yes or no.
the way i see it, neither NVIDIA or Apple can say anything about relative performance because there is nothing using tegra at that resolution.. you can benchmark/extrapolate all you want, but all that matters is real world.
the "quad core A5X GPU" damn well better be faster beause it's driving 4x as many pixels.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is funny. (Score:3, Insightful)
According to the first link in your linked article, the iPad2 beat the Tegra 3 by a very good margin: http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Asus-Eee-Pad-Transformer-Prime-Preview/?page=7 [hothardware.com]