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Apple iPad 2 As Fast As the Cray-2 Supercomputer
An anonymous reader writes "Presenting at the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing conference, a researcher from the University of Tennessee presented evidence that the iPad 2 is as fast as the original Cray-2 supercomputer. Performance improvements were made to the iPad 2 LINPACK software by writing Python for generating and testing various Assembly routines. The researcher also found that the ARM Cortex-A9 easily beats the NVIDIA/AMD GPUs and latest Intel/AMD workstation CPUs in performance-per-Watt efficiency."
I'm not sure you actually "read one more BS Apple story", this has nothing to do with how great Apple is. This was presented by Dr. Luszczek here in my research group at the Innovative Computing Laboratory to show the efficiency of ARM vs server class CPUs and GPUs. The only readily accessible ARM we could develop on at the time was the iPad2. As with most journalism, the main point of the presentation wasn't what the title of the story was.
According to wikipedia, the GPU in the XBox 360 puts out 240 GFLOPS. The CPU is harder to nail down, but it seems to have a peak around 115 GFLOPS.
The iPad 3 has a CPU that, from what I hear, has a peak capacity of 1.5 GFLOPS. The SGX 543MP2 in the new iPad 3 has 4 cores and does 6.4 GFLOPS per core, per 200 MHz. If we assume the 4 cores are clocks at 600 Mhz, that would mean the GPU output would be, in theory, 77.6 GFLOPS.
In short, whatever Carmack was thinking or testing, he sure wasn't hitting the peak performance of the Xbox - the console is still leagues ahead of the mobile CPUs and GPUs, and it's 7 years old.