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

This is funny.

[imagined.by]

The irony in this is that this is coming from a company that presented chunks of wood as their next-gen graphics cards.

Re:This is funny.

[DJRumpy]

One also has to consider that the older iPad 2 smeared the floor with the Tegra 3, why would they think that twice the performance is 'meaningless'? Considering Apple typically doesn't play too lose with the marketing statistics for metrics like battery life, real world performance, etc, then I don't find this to be a stretch. I will be interesting to see the real world benchmarks when the hardware arrives.

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Asus-Eee-Pad-Transformer-Prime-Preview/?page=7

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

Re:This is funny.

[ozmanjusri]

This is a Tegra 3 to A5 benchmark:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/12/01/1518244/nvidias-tegra-3-outruns-apples-a5-in-first-benchmarks.

Note that in the Apple infographic, they're claiming a 2X speed advanatge over the Tegra 3 with the iPad2's A5. That doesn't appear to be true, though the A5 has some advantages.

Whether the A5X has picked up enough ground to quadruple the Tegra's performance remains to be seen, and given Apple's debunked claims about the A5, seems unlikely.

Numbers are meaningless

[blahbooboo]

Does using the tablet have smooth and instant responsiveness? At the end of the day, that's all that matters. Tegra 100 or ipad 100 won't matter if the OS that uses it isn't smooth and keeps up with the user interactions. Consumers just care about experience, how they get there isn't of interest to anyone other than nerds.

Don't worry, Nvidia!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Just ask Intel about Apple's benchmarking strategy: For years, the finest in graphic design publicly asserted that PPC was so bitchin' that it was pretty much just letting Intel and x86 live because killing your inferiors is bad taste. Then, one design win, and x86 is suddenly eleventy-billion percent faster than that old-and-busted PPC legacy crap.

Or ask Amazon: Amazon releases 'Kindle' e-reader device. His Steveness declares "Nobody reads". And now Apple is pushing books, newspapers, and their own pet proprietary publishing platform...

Cheer up, emo Nvidia, all you have to do is sell Apple a Tegra N SoC, or even just the rights to include your GPU in their AN SoC, and Tim Cook will personally explain to the world that PowerVR GPUs are slow, weak, make you 30% less creative and are produced entirely from conflict minerals.

Re:Don't worry, Nvidia!

[TheRaven64]

Just ask Intel about Apple's benchmarking strategy: For years, the finest in graphic design publicly asserted that PPC was so bitchin' that it was pretty much just letting Intel and x86 live because killing your inferiors is bad taste. Then, one design win, and x86 is suddenly eleventy-billion percent faster than that old-and-busted PPC legacy crap.

This wasn't totally misleading. The G4 was slightly faster than equivalent Intel chips when it was launched and AltiVec was a lot better than SSE for a lot of things. More importantly, AltiVec was actually used, while a lot of x86 code was still compiled using scalar x87 floating point stuff. Things like video editing - which Apple benchmarked - were a lot faster on PowerPC because of this. It didn't matter that hand-optimised code for x86 could often beat hand-optimised code for PowerPC, it mattered that code people were actually running was faster on PowerPC. After about 800MHz, the G4 didn't get much by way of improvements and the G5, while a nice chip, was expensive and used too much power for portables. The Pentium M was starting to push ahead of the PowerPC chips Apple was using in portables (which got a tiny speed bump but nothing amazing) and the Core widened the gap. By the Core 2, the gap was huge.

It wasn't just one design win, it was that the PowerPC chips for mobile were designs that competed well with the P2 and P3, but were never improved beyond that. The last few speedbumps were so starved for memory bandwidth that they came with almost no performance increase. Between the P3 and the Core 2, Intel had two complete microarchitecture designs and one partial redesign. Freescale had none and IBM wasn't interested in chips for laptops.

Re:Don't worry, Nvidia!

[MisterMidi]

I don't know why you need a citation of what fuzzyfuzzyfungus wrote, but here you go:

Just ask Intel about Apple's benchmarking strategy: For years, the finest in graphic design publicly asserted that PPC was so bitchin' that it was pretty much just letting Intel and x86 live because killing your inferiors is bad taste. Then, one design win, and x86 is suddenly eleventy-billion percent faster than that old-and-busted PPC legacy crap.

Or ask Amazon: Amazon releases 'Kindle' e-reader device. His Steveness declares "Nobody reads". And now Apple is pushing books, newspapers, and their own pet proprietary publishing platform...

Cheer up, emo Nvidia, all you have to do is sell Apple a Tegra N SoC, or even just the rights to include your GPU in their AN SoC, and Tim Cook will personally explain to the world that PowerVR GPUs are slow, weak, make you 30% less creative and are produced entirely from conflict minerals.

Re:Last Tegra device I'll ever buy

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Well don't you worry, last week Apple announced Samsung's next tablet!

Apple's numbers make sense

[RalphBNumbers]

We recently saw a graphics benchmark of the A5 vs the Tegra3 posted to /., and the A5 beat the Tegra in real-world-ish benchmarks, and more than doubled it's score in fill rate.

The A5X is basically just the A5 with twice as many GPU cores, and graphics problems tend to be embarrassingly parallel, so unless it scales up really poorly with those extra cores (due to shared bandwidth limitations, or poor geometry scaling) it should have no problem beating the Tegra 3 by 2x, especially in terms of fill rate.

And when you quadruple the number of pixels on your screen, as Apple just did, which measurement matters? Fill rate.