Biting Into the iPad 3: Benchmarks Reveal Some Secrets

From DailyTech: Apple, Inc. (AAPL), as usual, astounded the world with its latest product launch. The company who made tablets a hot commodity a week ago pulled the wraps off its third generation tablet. Featuring a high-definition "Retina" screen from LG Electronics Inc. (KS:066570) and an LTE modem, the new tablet kicked off a crazed frenzy of pre-orders.

Using the Benchmark from GeekBench that measures integer, floating point performance, stream processing, and memory, the tester reveals that the computing power on the unspecified 1.0 GHz ARMv7 instruction set purported A5X dual-core CPU remains unchanged

The results would hint that when Apple said that its system-on-a-chip was "four times faster than Tegra 3", it was referring to the graphics processing unit, not the ARM central-processing unit. The GPU core is expected to be a quad-core variant of Kings Langley, UK-based Imagination Technologies Plc's (LON:IMG) PowerVR SGX543MP2, dubbed the SGX543MP4.

The SGX543MP4 is expected to pack a theoretical 134 MPolygon/s and 4 GPixel/s fill rate. AnandTech's benchmarking of the iPad 2 vs. NVIDIA Corp.'s (NVDA) Tegra in GPU-centric GLBenchmark showed the last generation iPad to be anywhere from 30 to 80 percent faster than Tegra 3 in different benchmarks, versus Apple's claim that it was twice as fast. Thus it could be expected that the new core in some cases would be 2x as fast as Tegra 3, or perhaps a bit better.

Given that Tegra 3 has a higher clock, perhaps it would be fair to say that to some extent in clock-per-clock Apple's GPU could be close to legitimately delivering 4x performance speed-up vs. Tegra 3, which is quite impressive (but again, the credit here goes first to Imagination Technologies for making the GPU, and second to Apple for securing the stock).

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