The Apple iPad Review (2012)
by Vivek Gowri & Anand Lal Shimpi on March 28, 2012 3:14 PM ESTThe GPU
3D rendering is a massively parallel problem. Your GPU ultimately has to determine the color value of each pixel which may not remain constant between frames, at a rate of dozens of times per second. The iPad 2 had 786,432 pixels in its display, and by all available measures its GPU was more than sufficient to drive that resolution. The new iPad has 3.14 million pixels to drive. The iPad 2's GPU would not be sufficient.
When we first heard Apple using the term A5X to refer to the new iPad's SoC, I assumed we were looking at a die shrunk, higher clock version of the A5. As soon as it became evident that Apple remained on Samsung's 45nm LP process, higher clocks were out of the question. The only room for improving performance was to go wider. Thankfully, as 3D rendering is a massively parallel problem, simply adding more GPU execution resources tends to be a great way of dealing with a more complex workload. The iPad 2 shocked the world with its dual-core PowerVR SGX 543MP2 GPU, and the 3rd generation iPad doubled the amount of execution hardware with its quad-core PowerVR SGX 543MP4.
Mobile SoC GPU Comparison | |||||||||||
Adreno 225 | PowerVR SGX 540 | PowerVR SGX 543MP2 | PowerVR SGX 543MP4 | Mali-400 MP4 | Tegra 2 | Tegra 3 | |||||
SIMD Name | - | USSE | USSE2 | USSE2 | Core | Core | Core | ||||
# of SIMDs | 8 | 4 | 8 | 16 | 4 + 1 | 8 | 12 | ||||
MADs per SIMD | 4 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 4 / 2 | 1 | 1 | ||||
Total MADs | 32 | 8 | 32 | 64 | 18 | 8 | 12 | ||||
GFLOPS @ 200MHz | 12.8 GFLOPS | 3.2 GFLOPS | 12.8 GFLOPS | 25.6 GFLOPS | 7.2 GFLOPS | 3.2 GFLOPS | 4.8 GFLOPS | ||||
GFLOPS @ 300MHz | 19.2 GFLOPS | 4.8 GFLOPS | 19.2 GFLOPS |
38.4 GFLOPS |
10.8 GFLOPS | 4.8 GFLOPS | 7.2 GFLOPS | ||||
GFLOPS As Shipped by Apple/ASUS | - | - | 16 GFLOPS | 32 GFLOPS | - | - |
12 GFLOPS |
We see this approach all of the time in desktop and notebook GPUs. To allow games to run at higher resolutions, companies like AMD and NVIDIA simply build bigger GPUs. These bigger GPUs have more execution resources and typically more memory bandwidth, which allows them to handle rendering to higher resolution displays.
Apple acted no differently than a GPU company would in this case. When faced with the challenge of rendering to a 3.14MP display, Apple increased compute horsepower and memory bandwidth. What's surprising about Apple's move is that the A5X isn't a $600 desktop GPU, it's a sub 4W mobile SoC. And did I mention that Apple isn't a GPU company?
That's quite possibly the most impressive part of all of this. Apple isn't a GPU company. It's a customer of GPU companies like AMD and NVIDIA, yet Apple has done what even NVIDIA would not do: commit to building an SoC with an insanely powerful GPU.
I whipped up an image to help illustrate. Below is a representation, to-scale, of Apple and NVIDIA SoCs, their die size, and time of first product introduction:
If we look back to NVIDIA's Tegra 2, it wasn't a bad SoC—it was basically identical in size to Apple's A4. The problem was that the Tegra 2 made its debut a full year after Apple's A4 did. The more appropriate comparison would be between the Tegra 2 and the A5, both of which were in products in the first half of 2011. Apple's A5 was nearly 2.5x the size of NVIDIA's Tegra 2. A good hunk of that added die area came from the A5's GPU. Tegra 3 took a step in the right direction but once again, at 80mm^2 the A5 was still over 50% larger.
The A5X obviously dwarfs everything, at around twice the size of NVIDIA's Tegra 3 and 33.6% larger than Apple's A5. With silicon, size isn't everything, but when we're talking about similar architectures on similar manufacturing processes, size does matter. Apple has been consistently outspending NVIDIA when it comes to silicon area, resulting in a raw horsepower advantage, which in turns results in better peak GPU performance.
Apple Builds a Quad-Channel (128-bit) Memory Controller
There's another side effect that you get by having a huge die: room for wide memory interfaces. Silicon layout is a balancing act. You want density to lower costs, but you don't want hotspots so you need heavy compute logic to be spread out. You want wide IO interfaces but you don't want them to be too wide because then you'll cause your die area to balloon as a result. There's only so much room on the perimeter of your SoC to get data out of the chip, hence the close relationship between die size and interface width.
Most mobile SoCs are equipped with either a single or dual-channel LP-DDR2 memory controller. Unlike in the desktop/notebook space where a single DDR2/DDR3 channel refers to a 64-bit wide interface, in the mobile SoC world a single channel is 32-bits wide. Both Qualcomm and NVIDIA use single-channel interfaces, with Snapdragon S4 finally making the jump to dual-channel this year. Apple, Samsung, and TI have used dual-channel LP-DDR2 interfaces instead.
With the A5X Apple did the unthinkable and outfitted the chip with four 32-bit wide LP-DDR2 memory controllers. The confirmation comes from two separate sources. First we have the annotated A5X floorplan courtesy of UBMTechInsights:
You can see the four DDR interfaces around the lower edge of the SoC. Secondly, we have the part numbers of the discrete DRAM devices on the opposite side of the motherboard. Chipworks and iFixit played the DRAM lottery and won samples with both Samsung and Elpida LP-DDR2 devices on-board, respectively. While both Samsung and Elpida do a bad job of updating public part number decoders, both strings match up very closely to 216-ball PoP 2x32-bit PoP DRAM devices. The part numbers don't match up exactly, but they are close enough that I believe we're simply looking at a discrete flavor of those PoP DRAM devices.
K3PE4E400M-XG is the Samsung part number for a 2x32-bit LPDDR2 device, K3PE4E400E-XG is the part used in the iPad. I've made bold the only difference.
A cross reference with JEDEC's LP-DDR2 spec tells us that there is an official spec for a single package, 216-ball dual-channel (2x32-bit) LP-DDR2 device, likely what's used here on the new iPad.
The ball out for a 216-ball, single-package, dual-channel (64-bit) LPDDR2 DRAM
This gives the A5X a 128-bit wide memory interface, double what the closest competition can muster and putting it on par with what we've come to expect from modern x86 CPUs and mainstream GPUs.
The Geekbench memory tests show no improvement in bandwidth, which simply tells us that the interface from the CPU cores to the memory controller hasn't seen a similar increase in width.
Memory Bandwidth Comparison—Geekbench 2 | ||||||
Apple iPad (3rd gen) | ASUS TF Prime | Apple iPad 2 | Motorola Xyboard 10.1 | |||
Overall Memory Score | 821 | 1079 | 829 | 1122 | ||
Read Sequential | 312.0 MB/s | 249.0 MB/s | 347.1 MB/s | 364.1 MB/s | ||
Write Sequential | 988.6 MB/s | 1.33 GB/s | 989.6 MB/s | 1.32 GB/s | ||
Stdlib Allocate | 1.95 Mallocs/sec | 2.25 Mallocs/sec | 1.95 Mallocs/sec | 2.2 Mallocs/sec | ||
Stdlib Write | 2.90 GB/s | 1.82 GB/s | 2.90 GB/s | 1.97 GB/s | ||
Stdlib Copy | 554.6 MB/s | 1.82 GB/s | 564.5 MB/s | 1.91 GB/s | ||
Overall Stream Score | 331 | 288 | 335 | 318 | ||
Stream Copy | 456.4 MB/s | 386.1 MB/s | 466.6 MB/s | 504 MB/s | ||
Stream Scale | 380.2 MB/s | 351.9 MB/s | 371.1 MB/s | 478.5 MB/s | ||
Stream Add | 608.8 MB/s | 446.8 MB/s | 654.0 MB/s | 420.1 MB/s | ||
Stream Triad | 457.7 MB/s | 463.7 MB/s | 437.1 MB/s | 402.8 MB/s |
Although Apple designed its own memory controller in the A5X, you can see that all of these A9 based SoCs deliver roughly similar memory performance. The numbers we're showing here aren't very good at all. Even though Geekbench has never been good at demonstrating peak memory controller efficiency to begin with, the Stream numbers are very bad. ARM's L2 cache controller is very limiting in the A9, something that should be addressed by the time the A15 rolls around.
Firing up the memory interface is a very costly action from a power standpoint, so it makes sense that Apple would only want to do so when absolutely necessary. Furthermore, notice how the memory interface moved from being closer to the CPU in A4/A5 to being adjacent to the GPU in the A5X. It would appear that only the GPU has access to all four channels.
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name99 - Friday, March 30, 2012 - link
Compared to the iPad1, the screen is, IMHO slightly smoother and a lot more oleophobic (ie it's a lot easier to clean off fingerprints by wiping a cloth over it). I never had an iPad2 so I don't know if these improvements are new or came with iPad2.shompa - Friday, March 30, 2012 - link
See = AppleTVTouch = Ipad.
But there was rumors about touch feedback from the screen. Probably in the next Ipad.
rakez - Friday, March 30, 2012 - link
as long as they stick with 4:3 i will never buy it.darkcrayon - Friday, March 30, 2012 - link
Similarly, that's one of the best things about the iPad. I can't see using a widescreen tablet in portrait mode, there is pretty much no popular content that works well there. On the other hand, 4:3 isn't as good for video, but the net effect is that the video is just smaller. I'll take properly positioned and scaled documents and smaller video over larger video and tiny documents.shompa - Friday, March 30, 2012 - link
You know that 16:9 is interesting if movies is the only thing you want to do.If you want to work on a tablet 16:9 does not work. You cant use landscape mode and see enough of the screen when you type. The 4:3 sceen is a bold move against tech nerds. I bet you are one of the tech nerds that screems when there are black bars on the side on you 16:9 TV. "why aren't the TV shows using the whole screen".
Then stupid TV people listen to you and crop 4:3 TV shows to fit 16:9 and cutting of large part of the picture.
The whole 16:9 debacle is actually a step backwards for the computing industry. Apple introduced widescreen displays early 2000. Steve made a great choose in 16:10. 2004 Apple invented the 2560x1600 screen. 16:10. Today its almost impossible to get a 16:10 screen. We all use TV LCDs for our computers = 16:9. 2560x1440. You loose 10% of real estate.
KoolAidMan1 - Saturday, March 31, 2012 - link
4:3 is better for web browsing and applications on a screen that size, the vertical room in landscape is great. It also makes for a much better balanced feel when holding it in portrait mode.Do you also like 16:9 on a desktop monitor? I sure don't, not unless it 27" 2560x1440
rakez - Saturday, March 31, 2012 - link
it's hard to argue with isheep and their products designed by god. i am pretty sure i know what i like more than someone else would know what i like. that being said, once again i prefer to not have 4:3 on my tablet. to each his own,Formul - Saturday, March 31, 2012 - link
starting with isheep and ending with "to each his own" ... you do love your bipolarity, don't you?rakez - Saturday, March 31, 2012 - link
sounds like i hit a nerve. go ahead keep following the herd. in the meantime i will buy what i want.PeteH - Monday, April 2, 2012 - link
Out of curiosity, what do you dislike about the 4:3 aspect ratio, and what's your preferred aspect ratio?