The Frequency of Apple A5X in the New iPad Confirmed: Still Running at 1GHz
by Kristian Vättö on March 13, 2012 12:02 PM ESTWhile Apple's new iPad won't be available until Friday, some users have gotten their hands on the new models and done some preliminary benchmarks. A Vietnamese site, tinhte.vn, posted a screenshot of GeekBench running on the new iPad (model iPad3,3) which showed a score of 756 and a 1.00GHz ARMv7 processor. For comparison, the GeekBench score of iPad 2 is 751, which confirms that the GeekBench reading of the frequency is indeed correct.
Image courtesy of tinhte.vn
In a nutshell, the processor in A5X is largely the same as in A5: We are looking at two Cortex-A9 cores running at up to 1.0GHz. Some people were anticipating an increase in the clock speed as A5X is expected to be 32nm while A5 was based on older 45nm process node, but it appears that Apple used all the gains of a smaller process node for better graphics.
The GeekBench screenshot also confirms 1GB of RAM, although that was fairly certain even before the release thanks to leaked screenshots.
The GPU, especially its frequency, is still a mystery but hopefully we will be able to get our hands on the new iPad as soon as possible and start testing.
Source: Tinhte.vn
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Dribble - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
To detract from the weak cpu. e.g. tegra 3 has 4 A9's @ up to 1.5Ghz, which means in most applications it'll be significantly faster. The exception being a few graphics heavy games.Death666Angel - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Are you reading this site? What kind of tablet app uses that many cores and/or that much horsepower from the CPU? Considering that Apple has to push more pixels in games than anyone else and considering that iOS doesn't need many CPU cores, I think they made the best decision. Now, I still won't buy a tablet for a year or more, but I cannot see how they made a mistake here.Sahrin - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
>Are you reading this site? What kind of tablet app uses that many cores and/or that much horsepower from the CPU?The OS? Anything that can be instanced (read: anything)? Anything that can be run in parallel with anything else (read: anything)? Also, note that the operating frequency of the CPU is 50% higher as well. So even in the world of a poorly written OS Executive vis a vi Apple iOS, all else being equal Tegra 3 is 50% faster.
Christ you Mac fanboys need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.
>Considering that Apple has to push more pixels in games than anyone else and considering that iOS doesn't need many CPU cores, I think they made the best decision.
I use an A5 on a daily basis, and I can tell you that the biggest problem with iOS ain't the graphics - it's the OS and thread switching. It hangs like Windows XP on 64MB of RAM. iOS has to be the least responsive OS I've ever used, and as a lifelong Windows user that's saying something. Graphics won't make it more responsive, just more eye candy - which is perfect for the Mac crowd - as long as they have something pretty to look at with an Apple logo they're pacified. It's like intellectual kryptonite to them.
michael2k - Friday, March 16, 2012 - link
Haha, least responsive OS? I guess you haven't used Android, then :)tipoo - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
From most benchmarks I've seen though that's not the case, T3 seems to be memory bottlenecked. It has a single channel memory controller for four active cores and a GPU, while others have dual channel for just two cores and GPU. Besides, Anandtech showed most mobile apps still aren't very well threaded, the majority still don't use two cores let alone four, and with Android and iOS multitasking is strictly controlled so you won't be doing four intensive things at once anyways.zorxd - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Most benchmarks so far are either GPU benchmarks or browser benchmarks.None of them are good to show the CPU speed.
metafor - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
So what use-cases are you thinking of that will scale to 4 cores and be bottlenecked by the CPU? I can think of some games that may rely on very heavy physics but those are few and far between. Not to mention they likely work just fine if they utilize NEON on 2xA9 anyway.zorxd - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Web browsing is (or at least could be) multithreaded. In fact any app that can use 2 cores can probably also use 4.But anyway, Tegra 3 is the fastest mobile CPU so far even if you disable 2 cores, because it's the highest clocked Cortex A9.
ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Programs that can use 2 cores can probably benefit from 4 cores. The question is are they already programmed to be highly multithreaded? If they aren't, how many developers are going to reprogram their apps to take advantage of 4 cores? Your point about clock speed is right, in that higher clock speed benefits existing apps without needing developer work. It seems most other new SoC from TI, Samsung or Qualcomm are focusing on high-clock speed dual cores rather than moving to quad core so the Tegra 3 may be the odd man out, which makes it less likely most developers would take the time to enhance their multithreading. Quad core may be a good marketing feature, but the end user will see the performance benefits.ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Due to the lack of an edit button the correction for my last line about is:Quad core may be a good marketing feature, but will the end user see the performance benefits?