Analysis of the new Apple iPad
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 9, 2012 1:37 AM ESTFinal Words
In many ways the new iPad was a known quantity. We knew to expect a faster SoC, a significantly higher resolution display and LTE support - Apple delivered on all fronts. The new iPad, much like another iPhone, is simply a tangibly improved version of its predecessor.
The iPad 2's display quickly became unacceptable from a resolution standpoint. The 3rd generation iPad's Retina Display completely addresses the issue and creates a new benchmark for other players in the tablet and ultraportable notebook space to live up to. It really is great to see Apple pushing display technology so aggressively and at reasonable price points. I do hope it's only a matter of time before we see a similar trend on the Mac side.
The finer details of yesterday's announcement were interesting - a much larger battery and 4x-nm LTE baseband. Arguably the most important information however is what Apple didn't talk about.
Today we have a first-world-problem with tablets, including the iPad - they are spectacular for certain usage models, but frustrating for others. Tablets aren't notebook replacements yet, but they can be more useful than a notebook depending on what you're doing. At the same time, tablets can be considerably worse than a notebook - again, depending on what you're doing. The solution to having the best of both worlds is to switch between or travel with two devices: a tablet and a Mac/PC. Ideally we'd like to see consolidation where you'd only need one.
Windows 8 proposes a solution to this problem: a single OS that, when paired with a convertible tablet (or dockable tablet like the Transformer Pad), can give you a tablet experience or a full blown desktop OS on a single device. Apple hasn't tipped its hand as to what the iOS UI strategy is going forward. I suspect we'll get some update at WWDC this year, but Apple is playing it very quiet at this point. Microsoft's strategy does bode very well for Windows users who also want a tablet, however it does alienate Windows users who want a more robust desktop experience. It's clear to me that Apple is trying to move the iPad closer to the MacBook Air in its product line, but it's unclear to me whether (or when) we'll see convergence there.
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name99 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
"We could still be looking at a 1GHz max operating frequency."In all the playing with demo models, was no-one able to sneak any sort of benchmark, or even get a "it feels faster" feeling?
Ignore LTE, consider WiFi models.
My iPad1 gets astonishing battery life (like 20hrs) if it is only playing movies. That tells me that the screen just doesn't consume much power (and neither do the h264 chip and flash).
Reading PDFs in GoodReader gives me substantially less time, maybe 10hrs, which tells me the CPU (plus RAM) still uses a remarkably large fraction of the power (and, perhaps, that GoodReader really ought to do a better job of allowing the CPU to sleep frequently).
OK, switch to iPad3. Why should we believe that the new screen uses substantially more power than the current screen, if run at the same brightness? Most of the power burned by a screen is in creating the actual light, not in the toggling of each LCD transformer.
Yet we have basically twice the battery available. This suggests to me EITHER
- Apple REALLY wants the device to have a long lifetime as a game machine, while the GPU is burning twice as much power as in iPad2. This is probably true --- Apple seem to be pushing the "replacement for XBox, PS and Wii, and their portable versions" angle pretty strongly, and maybe they have data somewhere that the number one complaint of parents who buy competing portable gaming systems is that they run out of juice half-way through an 8hr drive or flight, leaving junior screaming and whining.
AND/OR
- we have increased the CPU/RAM maximum clock by maybe 30% or so, allowing for higher speed than iPad2 with the same sort of battery life for CPU intensive tasks (and longer battery life for simpler tasks like movies or listening to audio)
Why didn't Apple just say the CPU is 30% faster? For the same reason Apple never wants to trumpet specs. They want to give the impression that their users don't have to worry about and comparison-shop specs --- Apple will just make sure that what they are buying at any point is a reasonably well balanced compromise between cost, performance, and battery life. They usually choose one semi-technical headline item to trumpet as "rah rah, better than last year" while remaining silent about the rest --- look at these sorts of product announcements for the past ten years. So, for example, this year is was "ooh twice as powerful GPU" but they didn't, for example, mention twice as much RAM (that slipped out from a 3rd party on stage), let alone how fast it is. Likewise in the past for different phones and iPads they haven't mentioned when they switched to DDR3 RAM from DDR2. Occasionally (eg 3GS) the CPU speed IS the headline item and then we'll get the bar graph of how it is twice as fast as its predecessor, but usually "faster CPU" is just taken for granted.
Point is, to me there are multiple lines of evidence to a CPU and/or RAM clock boost.
Also it would be nice to know (if not possible while at the Apple press conference, then at least as soon as we have devices in the wild) the other two performance numbers
- has the WIFi gained either 40MHz or 2x2:2, so it's faster than the current 65/72Mbps PHY?
- is the flash any faster?
tipoo - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Same CPU speed is confirmed now, it benchmarks the exact same in anything CPU bound.Supa - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Great review, easy to read, direct to the point yet quite informative.Some sites will bash Apple just to get attention, others write generic reviews that have little depth.
It's been refreshing to read, to say the least.
WaltFrench - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
“Apple continues to invest heavily in the aspects of its devices that users interact with the most frequently. Spending a significant amount of money on the display makes a lot of sense. Kudos to Apple for pushing the industry forward here.”And AnandTech continues to emphasize the aspects of technology that end up actually mattering in the real world. Kudos to this fine site for not obsessing over features that nobody can get any benefit out of.
Meanwhile, it'd be good to look at the usage pattern that is evolving. Apple's iMovie, for example, seems to have been unparalleled before they upgraded it this week. A customer can go into an Apple store and ask to see iMovie demo'd, but they are unlikely to get a good feeling AT ALL if they go into their Staples or Best Buy and ask to see what it'd be like to slap together a 60-second homebrew video for Facebook, on any other tablet. If music, photos and video are what drive users' buying decisions, then competitors are going to have to sink a fair amount of energy into finely-tuned apps for those areas.
spda242 - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
Anand/Brian could you please consider to investigate/write an article about why we Europeans are screwed by Apple when it comes to LTE support for our frequencies?I just don't get it, is it about hardware/software/marketing decisions/antenna design?
I have spent hours on the web trying to understand why Apple haven't released European version of the iPad but no one seem to know?
Pantsu - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
US LTE is different from EU LTE, different frequencies, and in practice far slower too. On the other hand LTE support isn't all that important at the moment in Europe since the operators aren't ready yet.iPad does support DC-HSDPA in Europe which is pretty much equivalent to US LTE.
spda242 - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
I am from Sweden and we have quite good LTE coverage and as far as I understand other European (Germany and rest of scandinavia for example) contries are getting there, but I also understand that UK for example are completely lost so far when it comes to LTE.To buy a new iPad (and later on the new iPhone?) without LTE support would feel like buying last years product. I don't buy it for this year only. I want to use it for some years and ofcourse Apple has "sold" me a LTE device and now I want it.
But my question was rather if there are technical reasons, if so which ones or if it is marketing reasons?
Steelbom - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
Anand, you said: "Also keep in mind that memory bandwidth limitations will keep many titles from running at the new iPad's native resolution. Remember that we need huge GPUs with 100s of GB/s of memory bandwidth to deliver a high frame rate on 3 - 4MP PC displays. I'd expect many games to render at lower resolutions and possibly scale up to fit the panel."However, Real Racing 2 supports 1080p output (not upscaled) on an HDTV at 30 FPS. That's 2 million pixels, 1536p is only another 1.1 million, and it's got two additional PowerVR SGX543's to help it along. I don't know what the memory bandwidth of a PowerVR SGX543 is, or if it stacks with multiples of them, but wouldn't the additional two 543's mean it could handle 4 million pixels at 30 FPS?
tipoo - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
Bandwidth and core performance are two separate things, keep in mind these SoCs use shared memory for both the CPU cores and the GPU. The iPad 2's memory read score was only 334.2 MB/shttp://www.anandtech.com/show/4215/apple-ipad-2-be...
Steelbom - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
Ah, right. I see. What does that mean exactly? What would the 360's memory bandwidth be roughly? (Is that the bandwidth on the GPU?)Cheers