NVIDIA Challenges Apple's iPad Benchmarks

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."

Comments

Re:This is funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

Smeared the floor with Tegra 3? I'm sorry, but meaningless benchmarks are meaningless. I hold both Tegra 2 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and iPad 2 devices in my hand at this very minute, and I can tell you that there is essentially no noticeable difference between the two in terms of responsiveness or 3D performance from the point of view of the end user (and that's despite the iPad 2 having a significantly lower-resolution screen than the Tegra 2 device. The latter has 30% more pixels than the iPad 2 does.)

For the iPad 2 to "wipe the floor" with Tegra 3, it would have to be significantly slower than Tegra 2, and it isn't. Hence, these benchmarks can be nothing other than complete nonsense.

Re:This is funny.

[ozmanjusri]

Considering Apple typically doesn't play too lose with the marketing statistics

What planet are you from?

"After a legal complaint by 70-year-old William Gillis over the "twice as fast for half the price" statement found in iPhone 3G marketing, Apple responded with a 9-page, 32-point rebuttal—one paragraph of which included this overly harsh, but very telling, statement:

Plaintiff's claims, and those of the purported class, are barred by the fact that the alleged deceptive statements were such that no reasonable person in Plaintiff's position could have reasonably relied on or misunderstood Apple's statements as claims of fact.

In other words, if you believe what Apple says in an Apple ad, you are not a reasonable person.

http://gizmodo.com/5101110/apple-no-reasonable-person-should-trust-their-marketing