NVIDIA's Tegra 3 Outruns Apple's A5 In First Benchmarks
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA's new Tegra 3 SoC (System on a Chip) has recently been released for performance reviews in the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Android tablet. Tegra 3 is comprised of a quad-core primary CPU complex with a 5th companion core for lower-end processing requirements and power management. The chip can scale up to 1.4GHz on a single core and 1.3GHz on up to four of its cores, while the companion core operates at 500MHz. It makes for a fairly impressive new tablet platform and offers performance that bests Apple's A5 dual-core processor in more than a few tests. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime with optional keyboard dock and NVIDIA's Tegra 3 is set to be available in volume sometime around December 19th."
A quad-core (technically quint-core) processor with 30% higher clock rates (40% higher for single core applications) is faster than a dual-core processor - I think saying "stating the obvious" is beyond redundant.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Of the linked benchmarks:
LINPACK: "Unfortunately, the iOS version of Linpack is different enough that we couldn't compare iPad 2 numbers in this test, and still get an apples-to-apples match-up (no pun intended)."
BrowserMark: Transformer is 11% faster than iPad2
SunSpider: iPad2 is 9% faster than Transformer
GLBenchmark Fill: iPad2 is 230% faster than Transformer
GLBenchmark Egypt: Transformer is 25% faster than iPad2
An3DBench: "This is an Android-only benchmark, so unfortunately the iPad 2 couldn't play here."
So a new chip beats a 9 month old chip in more than a few tests? What a shocker.
It's about user experience. And Apple's got that all wrapped up in a pretty little bow. Whereas none of their competitors do (HP came close, and we'll see about Ice Cream Sandwich but my educated guess is "probably not good enough for the average person").
I keep trying to figure out what people mean by iOS's user experience. I've got a transformer with the dock. Absolutely love it. Notifications are simple and unobtrusive. There is a back button that works.
I borrowed an iPad for a week and had to keep reminding myself NOT to throw it against the wall since it wasn't mine. At any point the damned thing needed to open a browser or map from one app the way back was not apparent and I ended up hitting the home button and needing to navigate back to where I was in the original app. In Honeycomb, I just hit the back button and I'm back. I guess if all you do is play Angry Birds it would seem pretty simple.
Don't take this as a flame. I'm really interested in why someone who uses both iOS and Android on a regular basis would say that iOS has a better user experience. I develop on and use both, but my personal iPod Touch is used for nothing more than a source of music on my alarm clock and in my Jeep. I dread using it for anything else.
And as an owner of the original Palm Pre I can certainly say that WebOS beats them both by a mile. Too bad the hardware was such shite and the limitations in the API were woeful.
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