iPad 2 doing less than 1 GHz

March 14, 2011 By Sovan Mandal 3 Comments

Well, the ipad 2 is already out and going great guns. Now that’s nothing unusual. Rather, it would have been a much bigger surprise if that did not happen. However, the real surprise lurks underneath the outer attractive shell, and that too right at it core. For the ARM Cortex A5 processor that Apple claims to have dual cores and a clock speed of 1 GHz in reality is showing to be capable of doing just 900 GHz at best.The startling revelation comes on the wake of software benchmarking test that the iPad 2 was subjected to by the good folks at AnandTech.

However, that does not make much of a difference performance wise as the iPad 2 came out trumps capable of rendering an impressive 57.6 frames per second in the GLBenchmark test. This is not only considerably better than its predecessor iPad which is capable of 17.6 fps but also betters the other prime iPad 2 competitor right now, the Motorola XOOM that could manage only 26.7 frames per second.

Sovan Mandal

Sovan Mandal is the senior tablet and tech corespondent for goodereader.com. He brings a international approach to news that is not just applicable to the North American market, but also Asia, India, Europe and others. Sovy brings his own writing flavor to the website and is interested in Science Fiction, Technology and Writing. Any questions, send an email

Miodzia

Cock speed? LOL
Anonymous

Graphics comparison was not fair. They used 1280×800 resolution on Xoom, while it was 1024×768 on iPad 2.
Benchmarks

As to the “benchmarks” anandtech performed:

Well, PcMag did a few benchmarks and the Xoom is ahead in those;
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381767,00.asp

And if you read the article you should realize very quickly that you really can’t compare one device’s benchmarks against another device, especially when display’s differ by 30% denser pixels. Just look at some of the Android phones with Tegra 2 in them and their benchmarks. You will find that the phone with less pixels does much better. It would be like comparing the iPhone 4 against another 1GHz phone that has low res–the iPhone 4 would loose badly in those benchmarks. Does that mean the iPhone 4’s processor is worse? Of course not. It means the iPhone 4’s processor has more work to do due to the resolution density.

Secondly, many of the benchmarks being used in anandtech’s tests do not use hardware acceleration for the Tegra 2 GPU but they do for the A5 GPU. Once again, anyone that understands tech just a little will tell you that makes a lot of difference. Samsung even requested that some of there phone’s benchmarks be pulled till those benchmarks update their software to show a reasonable comparison.

So. . .with that in mind. Realize that the Tegra 2 runs at 1GHz while the A5 at ~900MHz, the Tegra 2 has 8 GPU cores, and if what I’ve gathered is true then the A5 has only 2 GPU cores, and the Tegra 2 still has 1GB or RAM to the iPad 2’s 502.

Finally, PC game devs have stated that the iPad 2 would not catch the Tegra 2–apparently people that had access to the iPad 2 technology before it’s release.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2379264,00.asp

How accurate is that? I don’t know, but I’m sure within the next month we will see or hear clearer information.

Nonetheless, when comparing the two devices in th real world they are both balls fast!!! I doubt any “normal” person would complain of speed issues from either device. . . and I’m sure we will see more “accurate” tests in the near future; however, anandtech’s benchmarks are severely flawed and CANNOT be used to compare the A5 & Tegra 2 SoC.