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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ThreeDee912 - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - link
Interestingly, iOS has already had a port of Grand Central Dispatch from OS X since iOS 4. The thing is, I'm not sure how many people are taking advantage of it when coding iOS apps...BrooksT - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Two huge caveats:1) iOS uses a lot more hardware acceleration than Android; the tegra 3 may do more *work*, but that doesn't mean the user experience will be significantly faster.
2) To the extent that horsepower is left over for userland, the tegra 3 will be faster on CPU-bound tasks. There aren't a whole lot of these in the tablet space -- most apps are limited by network, GPU, or memory speed.
zorxd - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
1)ICS has full hardware acceleration2)GPU? Except 3D games, I don't think there is anything that is bound by GPU on tablet. Faster CPU helps while browsing real (non-mobile) web sites. Just like you wouldn't want to browse on a Pentium 3 PC anymore, a faster CPU is always welcome on tablets.
ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Most multimedia productivity apps on iOS are GPU accelerated since they would be built on the GPU-accelerated Core Image, Core Video, and Core Graphics frameworks that Apple provides. Adoption of these frameworks is presumably very high for these types of apps, especially for smaller developers, due to the speedup compared to going CPU-only and the convenience of not having to write your own OpenGL ES solution. Apple uses them themselves for iMovie, Garageband, and iPhoto. UI for all applications generally relies on the GPU accelerated Core Animation so the GPU can be more valuable than the CPU for UI responsiveness. Even text can be GPU accelerated using Core Text. These frameworks have always been GPU accelerated and generally have been around for a while for adoption should be very high. Given everything from text to UI transitions to images and video is GPU accelerated on iOS, it's not surprising that Apple wanted to focus on the GPU over the CPU.Now with expanded hardware acceleration in Android 3.x/4.x does Android provide these types of GPU accelerated frameworks for a variety of tasks? Is adoption by apps high? (These are actual questions since I don't know.)
r3loaded - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Yep, Android 4.0 does provide GPU-accelerated rendering paths for all apps that choose to use it. In fact, there's a developer option to force all apps to use the GPU accelerated path - it's disabled by default since some apps might crash with this set until they are updated, but I've not encountered any problems so far.ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Is it just GPU accelerating the rendering of the program screen to the display or does it GPU accelerate the functional compute tasks of a program such as the application of an image filter to a picture as Core Image does for photo editing apps?zorxd - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Stuff like video editing is GPU accelerated on PC too. Yet, you will never find any professional or even amateur video guy telling you that it runs just as fast on single core than on quad core. Not everything can be offloaded to the GPU.Also, UI transitions do not need a huge GPU. The SGX535 in the old iPhone is still good enough for that.
zorxd - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Tegra 3 is currently limited to 1.3 GHz at least on the transformer prime.BSMonitor - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - link
iOS doesn't require tons of CPU cores and threads to have great response times. All 4 cores at 1.5GHz says to me is "Battery = 0%".scook9 - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - link
So my Transformer Prime got 1721......just to put numbers to what was stated above me ;)That is Tegra 3 overclocked to 1.6 GHz by the way
So, Tegra 3 CPU > A5x CPU but Tegra 3 GPU < A5x GPU