The BlackBerry PlayBook Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 13, 2011 9:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Smartphones
- RIM
- BlackBerry
- PlayBook
- Mobile
TI's OMAP 4430
You have to hand it to NVIDIA, up until the launch of the iPad 2 if you were talking about a dual-core tablet or smartphone you were likely talking about something running the Tegra 2. Both Qualcomm and TI are late to the dual-core SoC game, but with the PlayBook we have the first shipping device based on TI's Tegra 2 competitor: the OMAP 4430.
At a high level the 4430 looks a lot like the Tegra 2, but dig a little deeper and you'll see that the SoC should be faster overall.
Like the Tegra 2, TI's OMAP 4430 has a pair of ARM Cortex A9s running at up to 1GHz with a shared 1MB L2 cache. Unlike the Tegra 2 however, TI implemented ARM's Media Processing Engine which gives it both a pipelined FPU as well as support for ARM's NEON SIMD instruction set (think SSE but for ARM SoCs). It won't be until Kal-El before NVIDIA brings NEON support to its SoCs.
On the GPU side TI uses a PowerVR SGX 540 by Imagination Technologies. The SGX 540 has four USSE pipes (SIMDs) each capable of up to two MADs per clock.
| Mobile SoC GPU Comparison | |||||||||
| PowerVR SGX 530 | PowerVR SGX 535 | PowerVR SGX 540 | PowerVR SGX 543 | PowerVR SGX 543MP2 | GeForce ULP | Kal-El GeForce | |||
| SIMD Name | USSE | USSE | USSE | USSE2 | USSE2 | Core | Core | ||
| # of SIMDs | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 8 | 8 | 12 | ||
| MADs per SIMD | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 1 | ? | ||
| Total MADs | 4 | 4 | 8 | 16 | 32 | 8 | ? | ||
| GFLOPS @ 200MHz | 1.6 GFLOPS | 1.6 GFLOPS | 3.2 GFLOPS | 6.4 GFLOPS | 12.8 GFLOPS | 3.2 GFLOPS | ? | ||
At the same clock speed, the SGX 540 has the same theoretical compute potential as the GeForce in NVIDIA's Tegra 2. The SGX 540 is a tile based renderer and thus tends to have an appreciable memory bandwidth advantage in current smartphone/tablet gaming workloads.
TI's memory interface is often touted as a significant performance advantage for the OMAP 4430. While NVIDIA has a single 32-bit LP-DDR2 interface, the OMAP 4 embraces a dual-channel (2 x 32-bit) LP-DDR2 interface giving it twice the theoretical bandwidth of what you'd get on a Tegra 2. NVIDIA argues that its bandwidth efficiency is high enough on the Tegra 2 that you don't need two channels, but it's honestly difficult to really validate claims like that.
The other major piece of the OMAP 4430 is its video engine, something TI calls the IVA 3 multimedia accelerator. This hardware encode/decode engine is what makes full 1080p30 playback and recording possible on the PlayBook. As you'll see in our video tests, the PlayBook is the first ARM based tablet we've used that can decode a 1080p H.264 High Profile video stream.
Overall the OMAP 4430 has the specs to be performance competitive with anything else out there today, definitely anything Tegra 2 based. Apple's A5 still has a much faster GPU but from a CPU standpoint, the PlayBook should be competitive. Any non-3D performance differences would likely be due to software optimization, not hardware limitations.
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tipoo - Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - link
Did you have anything running in the background there? Gizmodo and Engadget both got within 10% of the iPad 2's score, the one here seems to be much slower.Anyways, as usual this is easily one of the best reviews.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - link
This may be a sunspider 0.9 vs. 0.91 issue, RIM said the same thing but 0.9 for some reason gives us the scores you see on the PlayBook vs. the competition (just re-ran again to be sure).I'm still waiting for a response from RIM as to why the relative performance comparison is much worse under 0.9. We've stuck with 0.9 to maintain backwards compatibility with our older smartphone numbers but if need be I'll switch over to 0.91 for tablets.
I'm running 0.91 numbers now, let's see what I come up with.
Thanks for reading and your kind words :)
Take care,
Anand
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, April 14, 2011 - link
This is definitely a 0.9.1 vs. 0.9.0 issue. I'm not sure what is causing the PlayBook to choke on 0.9.0. I will update the article with 0.9.1 numbers as well.Take care,
Anand
8steve8 - Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - link
very high black levels on the screen is disappointing. (samoled/samoled+ is amazing)Also the bezel looks like its a huge percentage of the surface area, which is ugly.
7" seems to be the worst size, too big for pockets, too small for ideal consumption of entertainment or web.
The Base OS seems decent, although without email or calendar, we will have to give this another look in august.
That said, I still find tablets a niche device that few situations actually call for. Usually I find myself wanting a physical keyboard, or at least more screen space while typing. Also if you have to constantly hold it up, or buy a stand, why not use little laptops laptops, the screens don't need a stand : )
I find it a good device for a coffee table or any profession where you are standing/not at a table. Otherwise I'll stick to smartphone/laptop or desktop.
Solandri - Thursday, April 14, 2011 - link
The contrast ratio is the same as the iPad 2, so the high black levels is an artifact of the high white levels. In other words, if you turned down the brightness to match the max brightness of the iPad 2, the black levels should be the same as on the iPad 2.Along the same lines, I'm wondering what was the brightness setting during the battery tests. Usually reviewers do something like set brightness to half during the battery tests. But that seems a bit unfair since the Playbook's screen is so much brighter than the competition's. Wouldn't a more fair comparison be to set its brightness output to be the same number of nits as the iPad 2 in its battery test? In effect, think of the screen as the same as the iPad 2, but with the option to really crank up the brightness if you're outdoors in sunlight.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, April 14, 2011 - link
So our old method was to set everything to 50%, but lately I've been doing brightness matching right around ~150 nits on these tablets.Take care,
Anand
HilbertSpace - Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - link
Conclusion page:"I'm glad to see RIM experimenting with form factors. After using the Galaxy Tab 8.9 at CTIA I felt that may be the perfect balance between portability and functionality. The 7-inch PlayBook "
- something got mixed up there.
Aikouka - Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - link
I wonder if the browser would be better if you had the option to hide the menu/address bar?Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, April 14, 2011 - link
You actually do have the option to hide the menu/address bar, it's in the upper right corner of the browser. That does improve things but it also makes it less convenient to navigate to the next website.Take care,
Anand
jjj - Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - link
In the final words it would be worth reminding readers that it has no SD card slot, IMO a fundamental feature for phones/tablets nowdays.