Acer Iconia Tab A500: A Tablet With Honeycomb 3.1

GPU Performance: Tegra 2

As we’ve mentioned in the past, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets use what’s known as a system-on-chip (SoC). This integrates the processor, GPU, RAM, and several other subsystems onto single device. Since all of those components sit next to each other on the same chip, there is greater efficiency in data transfers, while reducing the amount of space consumed on the PCB.

Tegra is Nvidia’s SoC brand, and it symbolizes the company’s effort to tap into the mobile market beyond its desktop-derived GeForce graphics processors. A lot of engineering is tied up in this initiative, and what we see today in tablets like the Xoom represents the company's second incarnation of Tegra.

You may be asking "What happened to the first Tegra?" Flatly, it was far less impressive, even when it hit the market in 2009. Compared to Apple’s A4, it was a much more conservative design. Nvidia choose the older ARM11 processor, which probably explains the lack of design wins. Microsoft’s Zune HD was the only major product that employed the original Tegra.

Tegra 2 is an entirely different beast. It’s based on the Cortex-A9, which is a generation ahead of the older ARM11. This is the same CPU seen in Apple’s A5 (iPad 2). Read Apple's iPad 2 Review: Tom's Goes Down The Tablet Rabbit Hole for a full discussion of Cortex-A9 performance.

The ultra-low power GeForce isn't just a physically smaller GPU than the A5’s SGX 543MP2. Unlike Nvidia's desktop GPUs, Tegra 2 is based on an architecture that pre-dates its unified design. So, you’re looking at four pixel shader cores and four vertex shader cores. This means Tegra 2 operates most efficiently when it's presented with an even mix of vertex and shader code. We expect Nvidia to address that constraint in Tegra 3 (code named Kal-El).

The ULP GeForce has a maximum operating frequency of 300 MHz, but device vendors can tweak this setting to save on power. Nvidia provides less information on the Tegra 2 than it does for its desktop GPUs, so it’s best to move on to benchmarks. As in our iPad 2 review, we're turning to GLBenchmark 2.0.

In terms of frames rendered in a set period of time, the Xoom and Iconia A500 offer more performance than the original iPad but both still falls short of the iPad 2. Interestingly, the Iconia A500 falls ever so slightly behind the Xoom. We don't have performance numbers for the Xoom after the 3.1 update, which makes this a difficult comparison. Google added a performance-oriented optimizations in 3.1 that explain the large delta.

You can't use fill or triangle rates to draw a direct comparison of how well Tegra 2 utilizes its memory bandwidth, even though it's a quick-and-dirty way of sizing up other mobile GPUs.