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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."
By all accounts they sold 1.6 million of 'em, which isn't bad for a few months on a new product - about $2B the first half year. To have the next gen come so soon after is quite awesome. The original one will continue to sell on a long tail for some time, since it's great and has the best port mix of all Android tablets.
I've got one, and it rocks. Updates come quick and I'm really looking forward to ICS. All the apps I bought for my phone just automagically are available on the tablet and work great. Other tablet platforms might have a "limited apps" issue, but apparently Android was well designed to scale to different resolutions since version 1.6 oh, so long ago. If you get one, try "Corby." Google Talk is also nice - it lets me video chat with the kids when I'm away from home on business. Kindle is essential - I just downloaded "At Napoleon's Side in Russia", the journal of Armand De Caulaincourt of the Napoleonic siege of Moscow that many years later disheartened the Nazi invaders as told here. I'm gaining a new respect for the strength of the Russian people's character, which isn't a benefit I expected from a geek toy. The miniHDMI port is handy for giving presentations in conference rooms because the included Polaris Office handles Powerpoints nicely, and for reference docs there's PDF. It does Flash, which is nice when I want to research what the Internet is for.
The launch of the Transformer Prime solves my biggest problem with the Transformer: holding on to the damned thing. Apparently my wife and kids (and grandson) are fond of these apps and want to use my tablet all day. Now I can hand it down to them and get me the Prime. Sweet.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I don't care how fast it can run angry birds. I just care about the improved battery life this core provides!
The weighted companion core will never threaten to stab you and in fact cannot speak.
How is the battery?
You won't see the blinding speed when you're poking around the main UI or some of Google's apps, as they're occasionally nonresponsive, although screen transitions are a bit more fluid than on other Android tablets.
I wonder when this will finally be solved. Previously, the lag was blamed on poor hardware. With this beast, that excuse really does not hold at all anymore.
I'd like to ask why things are so bad at the other end of the spectrum... Why do we need to buy these high-end devices just to guarantee we'll have a tolerable user experience?
Specifically, why do inexpensive Android Tablets and Phones have such horrendous touch-screens?
I can name names. My big surprise was my recent purchase of a Samsung Transform Ultra... Which, at $230 didn't seem like a cheapo device compared to the many $99 android phones. Yet the touch screen was so horrible and glitchy that it was IMPOSSIBLE to use Swype to type anything but the shortest words. Assuming that couldn't possibly be a "feature" of a brand-name, mass-market android phone, I exchanged it for another, which had exactly the same problem. Plenty of forums with people complaining about the same thing, and saying Samsung hasn't offered any help.
The same is true of cheap tablets I've used. The touch-screens may be glitchy, or they may be painfully unresponsive and dog-slow. With a few these are adjustable via tunables in /sys, but sadly, most are not.
Why do so many devices, where the touch-screen is the primary and usually SOLE method of INPUT, fail so miserably in providing just a usable touch-screen?
That's really what these pricey tablets have going for them... The cheap knock-offs cut one-too-many corners, and there's nothing in-between high end devices, and low-end junk.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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).
Although Asus is just behind Samsung among companies that are learning fast how to take on Apple, it is a really bad decision to launch this device without an upgrade to ICS 4.0. Honeycomb is never going to compete in the tablet market. Even if it has reached the point of being quite usable, there are hardly any tablet specific apps available, the iPad is so far ahead. No one outside the geeky world is going to care about quad core, especially when the software experience still lags so far behind Apple, and the iPad still has a better GPU so it can look flashier playing games. The Prime is an incredibly sleek device but it is badly let down by the software, I still don't understand how they can make an incredible device and launch it with awful software.
Google need to convince developers to make tablet apps for Android. They also need to distinguish Google Android tablets from cheap chinese junk that has really damaged Android's reputation. The slow laggy bloated bloatware infested Android phones and tablets that major manufacturers have released haven't helped either of course.
It would be a terrible failure for Google if having a two year lead over Windows 8 they still can't develop a decent tablet OS and ecosystem to take on Apple.
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.
"Cell phone, tablet processors are becoming more powerful by the day, much faster than the desktop processors. Will there be a day when tablet processors are as fast as the desktop ones and we would just be hooking phone/tablet to monitors? (though we should solve the heat dissipation problem)"
Never, with the reason is access to electricity, not necessarily the heat dissipation as such.
Still, the tablets of today may outperform the top-of-the-line CPUs of yesterday. But the time gap is there due to energy requirements, where the battery-powered line-up has the lower hand.
Still, the effect-size may not be that relevant in the very near future. If you can do whatever task that most people do, then the innate upper hand of a desktop CPU may not matter.
As it seems, former high-end tasks like 3D gaming, 1080p video etc is no real match for many slate CPUs. It will be the apps (tasks) that set the limits in the future too.
I have an Acer Iconia Tab (It was side by side with the Transformer at Best Buy, but the $100 gift card sold me on the Acer). Same processor as the Transformer. I love it - lots of ports, fast, and as another poster said, apps from my android phone automagically appear on the Iconia.
I find it interesting talking to people about it. Their first words are, "Oh, you have an iPad?" Then the description of Android begins. Generally I get two responses: they either glaze over, or they say, "So it's an iPad knock off, then?".
The other night, coming back from a bar carrying my Acer, I slipped stepping on a friends boat. I went down, one foot in the water, the other on my knee (torn ligaments and a cast now). Where was the Iconia? Sometime during my fall, I managed to carefully lay it on the deck. I don't even remember doing it. Body broken, tablet fine. Even subconsciously I love this tablet.