Apple's iPad - The AnandTech Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Brian Klug & Vivek Gowri on April 7, 2010 9:39 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mac
- Apple
- iPad
- Mobile
The iPad and its Performance
Apple knows how to make things feel fast. It’s all about making animations as smooth as possible and making sure that the UI always responds consistently. Apple isn’t perfect in this regard, but it does pay more attention to detail here than most other companies.
On the iPhone, scrolling is always smooth, swiping between home pages feels quick, apps launching are always well animated. The same is (mostly) true for the iPad, but thanks to a faster processor, many of these animations are physically faster. Bringing up the home screen is lightning quick, as is swiping between them. Scrolling is also very smooth, so much in fact that I found myself scrolling through emails and pages just because the animation was done very well.
There are some rough edges of course. While swiping between home screens is nice and fast, bringing up the quick search screen is choppy (not Android choppy, but choppy for the iPhone OS). The same is true for some other apps, particularly 3rd party ones. The latter point makes sense given that developers haven’t had much time with the device, but Apple not ensuring a perfectly smooth UI across the entire OS is telling.
Apple tends to move engineering resources around the company. The iPhone launch delayed the OS X launch that same year. And the iPad launch surely had some impact on other products. Or is it the other way around? Later this week we’ll see Apple preview version 4 of the iPhone OS, which implies a release sometime in the coming months (June?). An on-track iPhone OS 4 release could explain some rough edges with the shipping iPad, as well as why we don’t seem to have a plethora of amazing apps from Apple at launch.
Despite my nitpicking, this thing is definitely faster than the iPhone 3GS and even the Google Nexus One. Surfing the web, loading applications or generally just interacting with the device. Going to a 3GS from a Nexus One feels slow, going to a 3GS after using the iPad just feels wrong.
But with a larger screen you get the desire to want to do more and expect more from the iPad. I would say that in this sense the performance is a letdown. The A4 is speedy but not quite fast enough for this size of device.
| iPad (Apple A4) | Google Nexus One (Qualcomm QSD8250) | iPhone 3GS (ARM Cortex A8) | iPhone 3G (ARM11) | |
| Manufacturing Process | 45nm | 65nm | 65nm | 90nm |
| Architecture | In-Order | In-Order | In-Order | In-Order |
| Issue Width | 2-issue | 2-issue | 2-issue | 1-issue |
| Pipeline Depth | ??-stage | ??-stage | 13-stage | 8-stage |
| Clock Speed | 1GHz | 1GHz | 600MHz | 412MHz |
| L1 Cache Size | ?? | ?? | 32KB I-Cache + 32KB D-Cache | 16KB I-Cache + 16KB D-Cache |
| L2 Cache Size | ?? | ?? | 256KB | N/A |
| GPU | PowerVR SGX | Adreno 200 | PowerVR SGX | PowerVR MBX |
To figure out where the iPad falls in the grand scheme of things I ran a number of web page load tests and browser benchmarks. To remove the internet from the equation, I loaded all pages off of a server on my own network. This is as close to a pure CPU and OS/browser benchmark as we’ll get.
Given that the iPad runs off smartphone hardware, the obvious comparisons are the iPhone 3GS and Google’s Nexus One. The former is based on a 600MHz Cortex A8, while the latter uses Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon QSD8250 running Android. Oh and there’s just one more thing:
This is ASUS' Eee PC 1001P. Priced below $300 it is the epitome of the netbook. Low cost and functional, but without looking overly cheap. Based on Intel’s Atom N450 processor this should put things in perspective. I ran the same set of benchmarks on it that I ran on the rest of the platforms. I used Chrome running on Windows 7.
| Apple iPhone 3GS | Google Nexus One | Apple iPad | ASUS Eee PC 1001P | |
| AnandTech Front Page | 4.5s | 4.3s | 3.1s | 1.2s |
| CNN Front Page | 5.4s | 4.4s | 3.9s | 2.8s |
| CNN Front Page 3 | 8.7s | 6.8s | 6.3s | 3.5s |
| 2.5s | 2.4s | 2.0s | 1.4s | |
| MSN | 10.5s | 5.1s | 5.0s | 2.8s |
| Yahoo! | 1.9s | 1.6s | 1.4s | 0.8s |
| Engadget | 15.0s | 11.6s | 11.1s | 4.8s |
To make this data easier to read I averaged all of the numbers for each device, normalized them to the iPhone 3GS (in terms of % faster) and put the data in a graph:
And now you see why I said the A4 does well against smartphones, but doesn’t cut it for the screen size of the iPad. While the iPad is 46% faster than the iPhone 3GS and 14% faster than the Nexus One on average, the Eee PC is 87% faster than the iPad. It is noticeable!
Real world JavaScript performance is also no contest between the A4 and Intel's Atom:
If Apple doesn't have plans to use Moorestown (or a derivitive) in its iPad at some point, I would be sorely disappointed in the company's ability to make intelligent hardware decisions.
I will give Apple credit, the iPad feels quick in most cases, which is probably why the sacrifice to go with a lowly Cortex A8 was made. However, when it comes to browsing the web, there’s a tradeoff. It’s much better reading web pages on the iPad, but it’s much faster on the Eee PC.
The comparison gets more complex when you look at things like application launch times. It takes the iPad 3 seconds to launch Pages, and less than 1 to launch Safari. If the application was previously in memory, the Eee PC can fire up Chrome in less than a second, otherwise it takes longer depending on what Windows decides to do with the disk at that moment. And launching Word from scratch takes much longer than 3 seconds.
Apple is relying on solid state storage and a very lightweight OS while netbooks usually have terribly slow hard drives and a bulky software stack. It’s a ginormous tradeoff. Web pages load quicker on a netbook, but are easier to read/navigate on the iPad.
What Apple absolutely needs in here is an Atom CPU. Apple buys itself a lot of leeway by using a very lightweight OS, but when a web page still takes a dozen seconds to load - you feel the pain. While I realize that Atom hasn't been suited for such an application until now, there's no reason Apple should've picked the A4 over Moorestown. Moorestown can fit in devices far smaller than the iPad, and would make this thing perform more like (and better than in some cases thanks to the OS) a netbook. I laughed when Jobs said that netbooks don't do anything well. While I'd agree a lot of the time, here they do seem to load web pages faster than the iPad.
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strikeback03 - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
My carputer runs fine with temps in the car over 100*F.Mumrik - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Man! You guys must really have been in a hurry to get this review up.It is long, critical and thorough as I expect from you, but there are quite a lot of grammatical errors and you repeat yourself a lot i places. :-D
Sunburn74 - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Anand,When you read the rhetoric between the gtx 470/480 reviews, your most recent Macbook pro reviews, and your current iPad review, its clear the latter is by far the single largest fluff piece ever posted on this site. You seem to have forgotten that people come to your site for one reason. We are the unknowing consumers who turn to your impartial judgement with one, and only one question: should we buy it?
Ryan Smith's gtx 470/480 review was superb. He didn't write "I could see myself buying a $500 gtx 480 for my 4th PC on summer trips to my house in the hamptons where I don't have to be using my real desktop for any real work". He flat out said "Nvidia was too little, too late". He didn't try to sell anyone on what might possibly be on some distant horizon in the upcoming future if you had the extra money; he delineates whether or not people should buy the item right now.
When future potential arrives, then you write another article explaining how the landscape has changed. Anand, your latest article shamelessly bent over backwards to positively sell the iPad in this way. How about comparing the ipad to the ipod touch, the iphone, the blackberry, the android, and explaining if people who own these items that deeply saturate our society what the iPad means to them? How about answering the bottom line question of if I should go buy one right now or if I should wait? How about any statement, however remote it is, on what sort of competition the ipad will face and what that means to the consumer? Who are you serving here? The people? Apple? Or your personal beliefs towards tablet PCs as something you simply want to succeed despite obviously being in infancy?
Anand, don't lose that journalistic sense of justice that requires you tell your readers what they need to know, not how you might use the item if you had extra money for a vacation to australia.
vol7ron - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
A couple of annoyances in the past with the iPhone 3g (aside form no-Flash) has been (1) it's lingering keyboard, (2) safari drop down menu assistance, and (3) delayed shortcuts1:
An example of the lingering keyboard is when texting someone else. There is no way to hide/autohide the keyboard once it's open. For the text messaging you can go into "edit" mode or simply go back to "messages" page and then back to the text, but why make it hard? I know my IRC apps make it easy to hide the keyboard, by just touching the screen again, why can't Apple just add a button?
2:
While the scrollable, assisted, drop-down menu in Safari is neat, those long-texted options are inadequate. Especially for cases that start off with the same sentence; for instance:
"I am a customer that heard about this site ..." {offscreen: from the web}
"I am a customer that heard about this site ..." {offscreen: from a friend}
"I am a customer that heard about this site ..." {offscreen: from work}
-- basically, you can't see the off-screen stuff until selected. I don't understand that since Apple has made a zoomable, fluid, paging device.
3:
While certain shortcuts would be effective on the iPhone, I think it's the response time that's lacking. For instance, the touch-and-hold period button has a popup option that allows you to select the ellipsis (tri-dot). That would be effective if the popup was more instantaneous - instead, it's faster to type out 3 periods. It's these menus that I hope are still prevalent in the iPad keyboard, but have a better response time.
vol7ron
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PS: loved the review. I am thinking about getting an iPad now - as stated before, I will have to wait for a price drop. $500-1000 is not acceptable, especially given the amount of storage. I'd love to see this device price range reduced to around $250-500 (perhaps hopeful future thinking).
Locut0s - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Looks like it. Nice if so!CSMR - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
We are seeing that limited devices (iPhone, Windows Phone 7, iPad) have an appeal to many consumers, who just want to do a small and finite number of things with them. This type of device can be stylish and effective.But I think Anandtech and other tech sites should have a prejudice in favor of computers rather than locked down devices. Limited devices can be cool, and I'm not saying AnandTech shouldn't review them, but it should prefer systems that are not limited.
Rather than going along with the average consumer tech sites could show the market how to make unlimited systems (tablets running Win7, phones running OSes like android, windows mobile) better designed and more intuitive, and show users how to use these effectively.
The current proliferation of locked-down devices has some strengths but it is a threat to computing. We've been fortunate that computers have been so popular. What if most people no longer use computers, but devices, and the market caters to them? What if the computer market becomes like the console market? What will advanced users do?
Impulses - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
Anand mentions that the iPad keeps performance decent by relying on solid state memory and a lightweight OS.... I'd like to see those iPad vs. netbook tests re-run against a netbook w/a SSD... I mean, a decent netbook plus a 40GB Intel X25-V is still cheaper than an iPad. ;)I realize that a $120 drive upgrade to a $300 computer isn't something the average consumer does, but it's pretty common amongst us geeks. /shrug Plus we've seen the X25-V as low as $99 (or $75 for the Kingston version). My X25-V gave my Acer Aspire One a nice kick in the pants, sure it doesn't make it play Flash video any better but it significantly improved multi-tasking, app loading, and hibernation.
A CULV laptop + a decent SSD wouldn't be much more expensive than some of the iPads after you factor in some of the options (stand, apps, 3G, higher capacities, etc). I realize they're not the same type of device, just trying to speak purely to the performance side of the argument here...
Impulses - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
I wasn't quite done reading the article when I wrote that last post... The battery life numbers for the iPad are pretty impressive, heck even the 3GS numbers seem impressive compared to my 2nd gen iPod touch. I don't know if Plants vs Zombies is just poorly optimized, or if the reduced processing capabilities of my touch drain the battery faster, but I'm lucky if I can get more than two hours of the thing with that game. It just rapes the battery life...I guess one reason Apple might've skipped out on Moorestown would be battery life considerations, 'specially when playing back media... The degree to which many games seem to drain smartphone batteries these days makes me wonder why we even bother though, I can't possibly consider gaming on my smartphone if it means the battery's not gonna last me thru the day because of it... Despite the fact that this one of the few things I do like about the direction Apple has taken the iPhone OS in (the gaming environment/potential).
Mr Alpha - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
I can of the top of my head think of two reasons why the iBooks app isn't installed by default.1. The iBookstore is US only, and the iPad is international. This means they would either have to ship the iPad with an app people can't use or have two sets of firmware, one for US and another one for the rest of the world.
2. The developer license agreement states that you can't duplicate functionality. So if they had included the iBooks app by default they would have had to either kick all other ereader apps and catch hell for it, or ignore it and come of a hypocritical while undermining their own license agreement.
dagamer34 - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
The iBooks app does not come with the firmware of the iPad, it is a downloadable app like Remote and iDisk.