Apple iPad 2 Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Brian Klug & Vivek Gowri on March 12, 2011 6:01 AM ESTThe GPU: PowerVR SGX 543MP2
There are no spoilers here but the PowerVR SGX 535 in the original A4 is out, replaced by the new PowerVR SGX 543MP2. The 543 as a building block has a bit over twice the peak floating point throughput of the SGX 535. The MP2 just means there are two of these 543s working in tandem. The result is what Apple uses as the basis for their "9x faster" GPU claims. In practice the improvement should be less than that, but it's still enormous.
We've got GPU performance data coming, but I thought I'd take a slightly different route and show what one developer is using the extra horsepower offered by the A5 for.
Epic Games is a familiar face around these parts. We've used games powered by their Unreal Engine in our reviews for years now. More recently Epic has made a splash in the iOS world with the release of its Citadel demo and eventually Infinity Blade.
In time for the launch Epic updated Infinity Blade to have some special enhancements for iPad 2 owners. Rather than simply deliver a higher framerate for iPad 2 users, Epic enabled higher resolution textures and anti-aliasing. The resulting boost in image quality is astounding, particularly on the iPad 2's 1024 x 768 screen:
Mouse over to see Infinity Blade on the iPad 2
There's far more detail in the character models as well as the environment. Lighting looks improved and the AA is definitely appreciated.
Mouse over to see Infinity Blade on the iPad 2
The gallery below has a bunch of side by side shots showing the improvements made to Infinity Blade for the iPad 2 vs. what you get when you run the game on a first generation iPad.
As we mentioned before, the A5 (and iPad 2) are about enabling developers. In a year's time the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 will be found in the majority of iOS tablets on the market - and games are just going to get prettier from there.
Update: We've published a look at the performance of the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 running GLBenchmark 2.0 here. If you want a teaser, it's good:
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rom0n - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
The reason why Ipad webloading tests may be better is that it is missing flash. It is not rendering the full web page.Unless anandtech is using initial Xoom firmware without flash. The new android 3.0.1 brings Flash 10.2 as well as other performance and stability improvements.
tipoo - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
I was going to bring that up too. If the Xoom has Flash enabled, its numbers are more impressive.Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
The test is run apples-to-apples, there's no Flash enabled :)Take care,
Anand
VivekGowri - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
Apples to Androids?arthur449 - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
zing!iwod - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
I really hope the A9 is true. Since there are reports they are Dual Core A8. ( Yeah i know ARM doesn't have that basic design ). But if we get A9 now, there is every chance the Apple A6 will be A15 plus Power VR 6. ( The same as Sony Ericsson ) on there next iPhone / iPad.But why apple only said 2x CPU Power when clearly Dual Core 1Ghz A9 should be at least 2 - 3 times faster. And test results doesn't always show the IPC improvement in A9.
winterspan - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
There is no Cortex-A8 multi-core ... Its either a Cortex-A9 or a modified custom-core like Qualcomm's Snapdragon that is a bastard child of A8 and A9 that supports SMP.Given the fact that despite the Intrinsity/PA SEMI purchases, the iPad/iPhone ARM chips have all looked like standard Samsung ARM parts, I highly doubt the iPad 2 is running a custom core. It is far more likely it is a standard Cortex-A9, with some custom power IC and other stuff.
Regarding the benchmarks, there are many other examples where going from Cortex-A8 to dual-core Cortex-A9 doesn't show >100% improvements...
metafor - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Because 2x the cores does not translate to 2x the performance under all but the tiniest fraction of circumstances.tipoo - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
They were probably being conservative, as very few apps will scale 100% performance wise across both cores.LeTiger - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
"Other hardware chances are the addition of front and rear facing cameras for FaceTime and taking pictures, but unfortunately, they seem to be pieces lifted from the iPod touch and nothing near the iPhone 4's 5 megapixel shooter.""chances" might actually trying to be "changes"?
Just a thought. Thanks again for the write ups lately, It felt ridiculously relieving to get Anand's take on the new mbp and ipad line, I felt like I couldn't trust any other news site's objectivity until I had the scoop with Anandtech :) (and as always, this is the only place I go for legitimate reviews with ACTUAL analysis instead of spec-chimping)
Keep em' coming!