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First Quad-Core Android Tablet Reviewed
adeelarshad82 writes "The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime happens to the first Quad-Core Android Tablet, which also makes it the fastest and most powerful tablet. The secret ingredient is Nvidia's five-core Tegra 3 chipset, including four cores which work together at up to 1.4GHz each and a 'companion core' which runs alone. When tested on the Antutu system benchmark, the Prime scored a breathtaking 10,619, which is roughly double the score of even fast devices like the HTC Jetstream. Benchmark results for Sunspider and Browsermark browsing scored at 17ms and 98324, respectively, which also happened to be amongst the best. The tablet weighs 1.3 pounds and measures 10.4 by 7.1 inches, but it's very slim at 0.3 inches."
Sorry, but I don't believe this. I've had multiple Android phones over the last couple of years and never experienced any lag except when I was installing an app in the background and trying to do something else. Then again, the reviewer bashes the tablet because it allows tablet owners to download any Android apps and not just tablet specific apps, so he's clearly an idiot or a troll.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
The battery rocks. It's like "don't worry about it" kind of good. 16 hour flight? No problem.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Guess you're not as picky as many others then: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914 and http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=20278
For at least the past 5 years, processing performance in almost all envelopes has been limited by power consumption and/or heat (which are two sides of the same coin).
Your i3 has a 35W TDP, this CPU looks like perhaps 2-4W TDP. So yours is 3.9x the speed while using 8.8x the power. Targeting a lower performance tends to allow for better efficiency, and so does having more cores/threads to do the work. This is largely because structures in a core that improve single threaded performance have diminishing returns for the amount of power they consume (caches, out of order execution instruction windows, buffers, wide superscalar execution, etc). So you can't necessarily say the Tegra 3 is a better device than the i3, but neither can you say the i3 is better (you really need to compare the same power or performance).
Multi-core isn't going to help basic UI issues, those will all be running on a single core. The problem is Android isn't really written to be efficient. XML based UIs running in Java (with garbage collection occurring who knows when), a codebase that's frequently convoluted and an architecture that sometimes looks like someone took the Gang of Four book and tried to use every pattern at once. I mean seriously, why does setting a selection on a text view require a selection class rather than a start and end index in the widget?
If you want to fix it, you need a complete overhaul of the framework and quite likely rewrite chunks of it in C or C++.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Ice Cream Sandwich fixes this, but also has hardware requirements that mean very few existing devices will be supported
Google has stated that pretty much every device that can run Gingerbread (50% of all Android devices out there run Gingerbread) can run Ice Cream Sandwich.
The secret ingredient is Nvidia's five-core Tegra 3 chipset
You really think these compact machines use sets of chips? Quite the opposite. They're systems on a chip (SoC), often even a package on a package (PoP) i.e multiple chips layered into one package. Now, don't get smart and point out that technically a PoP is a chipset - they're used for packing an SoC with DRAM and flash memory. The multiple functions of a chipset (e.g peripheral interfaces) are all on the one chip of the SoC.
iPhone OS applications are written in Objective-C and compiled directly to native code. It also has pointers and all the other trappings of a real language and execution environment.
That is quite impressive when you consider that the Transformer has extra peripherals to run such as the SD card. The screen is also higher resolution (more graphics load), it multitasks, performs better and costs less.
There is nothing magical about Apple hardware.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Android was historically developed without any GPU acceleration requirements, and the OS up through Honeycomb still does most UI drawing on the CPU instead.
Absolute rubbish. Android's UI is rendered with OpenGL ES and thus fully hardware accelerated. It has been since day one, it is just that most cheap phones have slow GPUs with old drivers and little graphics RAM. OpenGL ES support is mandatory for Android devices, but of course low end chipsets use software rendering to make up for lack of hardware support. Even if the hardware supports basic operations like blitting images older chips don't support DMA so the CPU has to manually copy the image into graphics RAM first.
Bad touch input is usually down to the update rate of the touch controller (the cheap ones only manage about 12 updates per second) and phones lagging because they have crappy manufacturer supplied UI mods. You can see this easily by comparing older HTC phones running the stock firmware and Cyanogen. The stock firmware has the HTC Sense UI that slows everything down and make the touch screen unresponsive, but load up Cyanogen and set the UI to use 16 bit textures for lists and menus (to conserve graphics RAM) and it will fly along.
People seem to expect iPhone like performance from Android devices cost 1/5th as much. My Galaxy S with all effects turned on is just as slick as an iPhone, more so in fact because it supports live wallpapers.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC