iPad gets benchmarked.
By now, all major tier one publications have published their reviews of the iPad. All reviews seem to be generally positive, but so far none have put the iPad under any serious benchmarks and stress tests.
Our good friend Anand had his iPad delivered on Saturday, and has already run the unit through various tests. Although he's still working on an exhaustive review, the iPad, when compared to the iPhone 3GS and Google Nexus One seem to perform quite well.
The iPhone 3GS uses the ARM Cortex A8 CPU while Google's Nexus One uses Qualcomm's very speedy Snapdragon QSD8250 CPU. Both phones are fast by today's standards, but Apple's A4 CPU seems to stack up well against what's available.
"So how does Apple's A4 stack up against today's favorite smartphone brainchild? Extremely well. The A4 is particularly exciting because it combines Snapdragon-like CPU performance with a PowerVR SGX GPU. A much better option than the aging ATI core used in Qualcomm's QSD8x50 series," says Anand.
Check out his initial impressions at AnandTech.
Why haven't we seen any Tegra phones yet? It's more powerful than both of these platforms.
Sorry, but I can't do any worthwhile computing with less than a modern ~2ghz+ dualcore and graphics better than an Intel IGP. I don't need that much power in my cellphone, but the iPad is not a cellphone.
Why haven't we seen any Tegra phones yet? It's more powerful than both of these platforms.
"•The A4 is a Package-on-Package (PoP), with at least three layers of circuitry layered on top of each other. A4 is packaged just like the iPhone processors, microprocessor in one package and two memory modules in the other package. They're all sandwiched together in a very nice and thin PoP.
•
•The iPad RAM is INSIDE the A4 processor package. Confirming this took quite a bit of sleuthing: we had to partner with Chipworks to X-ray the processor. The X-ray revealed two layers of RAM. In addition to the ARM processor, the A4 package contains two stacked Samsung dies."
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/03/hey-look-at-that-ifixits-ripping-an-ipad-to-shreds/
You can find the detail of performance tests used in the AnandTech's review.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3633/apples-a4-soc-faster-than-snapdragon
Battery life. It is a reading device, not really an all around multimedia device.
Sorry, but I can't do any worthwhile computing with less than a modern ~2ghz+ dualcore and graphics better than an Intel IGP. I don't need that much power in my cellphone, but the iPad is not a cellphone.
The device isn't perfect, but Apple delivers an product that will bring back many industries (Comic Books for example). So call it a giant iPod or iPhone, Apple just sold 700k of them in day! I will pick up a 3G for travel, surfing and book reading. As long as you have a purpose for it, you won't be disappointed. People who expect to use them as a computer replacement will be disappointed (you need a computer and itunes to make it work). Thus it should be compared to netbook or anything else, it is it's own thing.
Well said!
Complains like "I can't do any worthwhile computing with less than a modern ~2ghz+ dualcore" are out of the context. Nobody in his mind expects running 3DMax on an iPad :-)
What iPad does it does vast or very fast.
Battery life. Good performace.
More like, but can it run... Windows?
hmm... sort of... but not nativelly...
"In our instantiation of space-time, the iPad is simply running a VNC client called Desktop Connect, and connecting to my Macbook,"
http://gizmodo.com/5508794/video-windows-7-on-the-ipad
In short, "One of these is not like the other..."
Go read something else. No one forced you to click on an iPad article.