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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."
*sigh*
Tegra 3 is faster than the A5? Whoopty-doo. You know why Apple is winning the tablet and phone market? Here's a hint: It's not about specs anymore. When it comes to tablets, people don't care about benchmarks or who's got the fastest RAM. We (Slashdot geeks) might, but the rest of the world couldn't give a flying fuck. 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").
So yeah, run all the benchmarks you want NVIDIA, but when it comes down to actual concrete sales, Apple's still going to eat you for breakfast.
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.
I have the first Transformer, I'm very pleased with it.
Does it change into a car or plane when you need it to?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Apple is "winning" the tablet war for two reasons:
1) They had a good year lead in entering the market (actually more since the first Android tablets weren't designed to be tablets and were released against Google's recommendation).
2) They have a cult of fanboys who would literally buy anything with the Apple logo on it and those people then pressure other people to get Apple products to "be cool".
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
They need faster processors to deal with CarrierIQ's overhead on looking at everything you do and sending them every keystroke.
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.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
It's not cheating, but it's (non-deliberately) deceptive when it comes to the measures that matter to companies. "Android" is not a model of phone any more than "Windows" is a model of computer. Even with only 5-7% of the computer market, Apple has been one of the more profitable computer manufacturers for the last decade or so. Compare Windows to OSX and Apple is clearly "losing". Compare Mac sales to Dell sales or HP sales and Apple is doing almost phenomenally well. Similarly with phones. iOS is "losing" to Android by a lot of measures, but Apple is doing better than any other vendor of smartphones. Apple is "winning in the phone market" because they consistently make and sell more phones than any one other vendor (and probably make more money per phone to boot). They aren't necessarily winning in the phone OS market, but that's OK.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Open a handful of apps. Switch between them. Now lock it and put it away for a couple of hours. Now unlock it: quick, where does "Back" take you?
Double-click on the iOS home button and you get the application switcher, so you can get back to any other running app, exactly in the state you left it.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I fucking hate people like you who let their hatred blind them. No matter how you feel about the company, they make WORLD CLASS systems. To totally disparage the technical merits of what they do because of how they market is childish. If Apple made products that didnt work very well, we wouldnt really talk about them on slashdot.
Good-bye
If that's true, why can I buy 100,000 battery cradles, camera add ons, cases, credit card readers, sushi makers and personal massager extensions for my iphone but there are barely any Android specific accessories besides a few cases and some carrier marketed dash/desk mounts. I'll tell you why. The Samsung Galaxy S II HD Prime XD Touch SDHC AMOLED+ Carbon Fibre Edition (tm) doesn't use the same peripherals as the Nexus Prime Squared Factorial 4. The iPhone 4 and 4s have given accessories manufacturers essentially 1 shape/interface with which to build an accessory for a potential market of 100m+ users.
Great Android selling phones do about 10% of a single iPhone model. There are 3 significant iPhone models still in the wild and 2 of them and 90+% of the volume are the same form factor. Is there a Moto Droid RAZR Deli Slicer 7.1 Kevlar port in your car? No, but my Elantra came with an iPhone dock (as does about 70% of US automobiles.)
If we can actually get to TFA! Shocker that a chip that has only been available in engineering samples is outpacing a chip that shipped in a device in March. So in other news, chips get faster over time? Shocked. Even if this were important (and it isn't) this is not a fair fight. All it does is give Apple a benchmark/target to aim for with the A6 or what ever it will be that they ship in the iPad 3 in about 3-4 months, which oh by the way, will be showing up about the same time that a device with this chip in it makes it to market too.
It's not just about chip speed. It's about battery life, user experience, polish, and efficiency. The quicker the Android licensees stops marketing their phones like they are hocking graphics cards in 2004 the sooner one of them will have an individual hit.
I find it interesting that Apple users are a cult, while rabid Android supporters are just fine.
No, I don't have Apple stuff.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I keep hearing this, but it is not borne out by reality. There would have to be an awfully large number of cult fanboys to sustain the kind of numbers Apple is posting. At what number do cult fanboys turn into satisfied customers?
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
It's times like this I wish I had mod points.
Scratch that, it's times like this I wish I ran my own Slash site so I could invite you over.
It's not just about accessories. The Android software platform is as fractured as it gets, with a bazillion different versions, different hardware that simply cannot be trusted or relied upon. Some are great phones like the Samsung Galaxy line, and then a neverending stream of shit phones like, well, Huawei, Motorola, Alcatel... half-assed sweatshop garbage.
As a developer, even though Apple's walled garden is quite frustrating to navigate, I have less to worry about when developing iPhone apps vs Android or Blackberry, as if an app works on my iPhone, it's a pretty safe bet that it'll work on all of them. It's much like writing for a gaming console. There are only a few minor gotchas, that are trivially resolved during testing with the various simulators.
With Android, about half of my the bug reports I get must be replied with "I'm sorry, but your phone does not support rotation. Yes, the epileptic shimmering is normal on a Motorola. No, our app isn't slow, it's your goddamned korean knockoff phone. Congratulations, your device supports flash. Too bad it only has a 2.77 mhz processor without H.264 acceleration."
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It's not that the Androids are cheap. It's that like the tablets they offer more choices. iPhone is great if it's what you want. But if you want a keyboard, removable battery, microSDHC, dualSIM, HDMI 1080p outputs, a different camera, a flip phone, a cheaper phone, a phone that comes in red... you're getting an Android.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I work for a company that does marketing for both Apple and Android manufacturers. Trust me, they all have great marketing teams and big budgets. The success of the products isn't as simple as marketing.
The difference is that Apple takes the time to do both hardware AND software specifically so that they can build a unified consistent experience. Whereas Android manufacturers just slap the Android OS on the hardware and hope for the best.
To counter your anecdotes, time and time again I hear people bitching about their Android devices because it's slow, or software is buggy and inconsistent, or UI is confusing, etc. I think it's pretty telling that the "touch" event in the Android API is called "click".
Android is not a company. It's completely irrelevant if 200 companies combined can outsell one (1) company if that single company outsells each of them individually. Just because Motorola and Samsung makes Android phones doesn't mean they are BFFs. Every single Android phone maker competes with all the other Android vendors. Apple makes 52% of all the whole phone profits. All the other 200 phone maker have to share the remaining 48%.
Here's what most Apple fans fail to understand: most of the rest of us don't give a shit about *any* company. I don't care if Apple or Motorola or HTC or Samsung have the largest marketshare; all I care about is having choices. Apple's ecosystem gives you *no* choice -- if you want an iOS device, it comes from Apple. If you buy accessories, they will *only* work with Apple hardware. If you buy software, it will *only* work with Apple hardware. If at some point in the future you don't want Apple hardware, you're also throwing away all of the rest of your investments.
In the Android ecosystem, there are a multitude of choices in terms of manufacturer and price point. If I buy an HTC device now, when I'm later looking to upgrade I'm not locked into buying from HTC again, because my software will work on a Samsung phone. My accessories will work with any device that supports a USB interface. I'm not stuck with a single manufacturer to make use of all of my older stuff.
I'm willing to have some stuff that doesn't "just work" if it means I get more choices out of the deal -- the funny thing being that Apple does not and has never had stuff that always "just works," so I'm really not making much of a sacrifice there. Every consumer computing device ever has had at least a few bugs, and you learn to work around them (or, in the case of Apple fanbois, deny them).
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal