iPad 3 (aka The New iPad)

Discussion in 'Technology' started by khaid, Mar 7, 2012.

  1. Re: Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    Why do people only tell me these things AFTER I have had a kid?
     
  2. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    This is how I see it. Anything business crucial that you can do on an iPad can be done on a smartphone which is something that you actually NEED anyway these days so that makes the iPad a redundant, non-necessity. The iPad only serves for expanded screen use which really isn't necessary and only actually useful for leisure. Anyone who apparently NEEDs the bigger screen use for productivity use every now and then could get much, much more from a laptop for the same price. Meanwhile their smartphone would fill the gap of an ultra portable organiser/email/web/phone device. If you're going to have something less portable you might as well be able to do a hell of a lot more on it and use it ergonomically in different situations as you obviously must want to a lot more data entry than you would on a phone otherwise you wouldn't have bought such a device as a phone would suffice just fine.
     
  3. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    Meanwhile the actual capability of these "dual" and "quad" cores are around 1/4 or less than that of a core 2 duo and the memory bandwidth of the ram is also around 1/4 of that used in those MacBooks. But yeah, it's quad core and 1GB! No further clarification needed! Quickly, link 50,000 of them together via bluetooth and create the worlds fastest super computer!
     
  4. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    Why do you keep saying that? I'm not arguing that the iPad has replaced every conceivable use of a laptop or desktop. I'm saying that it already covers the types of uses that the majority of consumers and business people typically buy computers for. That's it. Not every computer buyer. The majority of computer buyers.

    This is where you lose me. Why would it necessarily have to be something that an iPhone or MacBook couldn't do? That isn't how a consumer or business person looks at a purchase. They think "what do I need it to do" and look at the options.

    Here's a hint: it's a convergence device. Remember how ridiculous you and others thought it was to say that tablets or smartphones could replace gaming consoles in the near future? Do you think it's ridiculous now? Was reading books and magazines on an electronic device very popular prior to the e-reader? Can I use my laptop as a guitar, piano, or drum pad without an additional accessory? There are all sorts of uses that were previously the domain of separate devices that converge with smartphones/tablets, and some of those uses are more engaging and functional with a larger touchscreen found in tablets.
     
  5. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    Really? Where's the link backing up the "1/4" power claim? Maybe you should take a look at the chart below. Note that the "Kal El" is NVidia's Tegra3 system-on-a-chip, which khaid already mentioned was outperformed by Apple's iPad 2 SoC. The iPad 3 SoC is even better.

    [​IMG]

    Tegra3 is above the Core 2 Duo in this chart. And the 2006 flavor of the MacBook Pro was using the Core Duo, not Core 2 Duo. What about the GPU comparison between the iPad 3 and the 2006 MacBook Pro? Do you really think the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 is more powerful than the PowerVR quad core GPU in the iPad 3?

    It seems to me that the 2006 MacBook Pro advantage was mainly in RAM and disk space, not the CPU/GPU combination.
     
  6. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    That's the most vague, misleading chart I have ever seen.

    First off, what is core mark and how is it an indication of overall performance? Secondly, that's per MHz, or an IPC based measurement for ONE benchmark suite. Considering mobile SOC's run at half the clock speed or less than laptop CPU's you can double the scores of the Core 2's and Core i7 right there.

    How about this much more comprehensive comparison:

    http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1204_armfeb&num=2

    And a couple of nice cherry picked graphs which I'm sure suits your style (also in line with Apples) of comparing things much better,
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]

    Actually using a Core Duo at 1.83GHz, 1GB RAM and an ATI X1400. The OMAP 4660 is an ARMv7 Rev 10, aka Cortex A9 dual core at 1.2GHz paired with 912MB of memory and a Texas Instruments OMAP GPU.

    There you have it, a complete review comparing a Core Duo as it would have been in the original Intel MacBook era and a Cortex A9 both running the same OS. A9 is strong at some things being almost half the speed of a Core Duo, but up to 10x slower at many other tasks.

    Lookout! Supercomputer market! ARM have almost* caught 6 year old laptop chips!
     
  7. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    In 2006 no one cared about video unless they wanted to game or run very mildly accelerated tasks (very limited back then). Things have changed. A modern 6990M would be in the order of 5-20x the capability of a SGX543MP4+. SGX543MP4+ matches current HD consoles in some ways, but lags in others. Being a closed system yes anything developed for it will be better than what can be done on a windows PC, but clearly decent laptop GPU's are still far enough ahead to more than counter that.

    Yes, the CPU and GPU of the ipad3/vita are amazing for their low power use, they just aren't as close in raw capability to high end laptop hardware as you seem to have led yourself(or have been led) to believe.
     
  8. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    Matches in which ways?

    PowerVR SGX543MP4-200 = 28.8 GFLOPS (4 cores x 4 units x 9 ops x 200 MHz)
    PowerVR SGX543MP4-250 = 36 GFLOPS (4 cores x 4 units x 9 ops x 250 MHz)
    AMD E-450 GPU = 81.3 GFLOPS (80 units x 2 ops x 508 MHz)
    Radeon X1600M = 87.3 GFLOPS ((12 p-units x 12 ops + 5 v-units x 10 ops) x 450 MHz)
    Radeon X1900M = 204.8 GFLOPS ((36 p-units x 12 ops + 8 v-units x 10 ops) x 400 MHz)
    Xbox 360 GPU = 240 GFLOPS (48 units x 10 ops x 500 MHz)
    Radeon HD 6990M = 1601.6 GFLOPS (1120 units x 2 ops x 715 MHz)
     
  9. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    Pixel fillrate, both the PSvita and X360 can do 4 Gigapixels/sec. iPad GPU clock speed isn't confirmed and could only be clocked at 166MHz. That's about it really though... I was trying to be generous as in every other way it falls fairly short. 140 Million Triangles/sec vs 250 and 500 for the PS3 and 360 respectively. Shader and texture performance I'm really not sure about.

    But thanks for the X1600M performance, I only found X1600 numbers and couldn't remember the difference between that and the mobile version. Seems like it is more than a match for the SGX543MP4+, depending on the situation of course. I'm not sure on the memory bandwidth but the x1600 only had 10GB/s. I'm not that sure what the iPad 3 could achieve (ipad 2 was like 2-3.5GB/s in practice from benches) and the VITA has 128MB of dedicated VRAM although I'm not sure how fast that is either.
     
  10. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    I'm saying I don't think you know who the majority of computer users are. My parents own a computer. I wouldn't consider them computer users. They barely touch the thing at all!!

    I'm saying an iPad is unnecisary. if these buisness people DID think that way they REALLY wouldn't have an iPad in the first place.

    Convergence device= unnecessary. everything you pointed out is IMO possibly the worse way of doing things. I mean... reading a book on screen?? C'mon. Sure it's popular but you can't tell me that doesn't strain your eyes.... if not your pocketbook.

    Yes we are speaking two different languages.

    PC today >>>>>>>>>>> PS3 > PC from 2006 > Vita
     
  11. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    That's a lot o' pixels. Does the PowerVR SGX543 not have 2 texture and 2 render units?

    200 MHz x 2 units x 4 cores = 1.6 billion/sec
    500 MHz x 2 units x 4 cores = 4 billion/sec

    Does the Vita GPU run at 200 MHz?

    Due to the nature of PowerVR rendering, ImgTec multiplies the fill rate by an estimated scene depth complexity.

    [quote author=Imagination Technologies]1 Gpixels/sec fillrate at 200MHz,*
    * All fill rate figures stated assuming a scene depth complexity of x2.5.[/quote]

    So it's not an apples and apples comparison.
     
  12. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    Well that was an odd marketing move. It sure is more in line with the Tri/sec figure. People sure are eating up this "as fast as current consoles" nonsense.
     
  13. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    alot of people are just going by straight up visuals without looking at numbers. and it really does look on par with the current gen consoles.
     
  14. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    The latest iPad will easily be in line with laptops from 6 years ago, minus the RAM and disk space. You can post as many Linux Ubuntu server benchmarks with the OMAP 4460 as you want if that makes you feel better. I own a Core Duo laptop from that era and it's noticeably slower than my iPad 2 for things like browsing large folders of photos. Heck, it was slower than the original iPad for photo browsing. All those extra Ghz don't seem to be quite the advantage you think they are.

    Nonsense? I seem to recall Mark Rein saying the original single core CPU/GPU iPad had roughly the equivalent performance of a single core of the 360. Now look at this chart:

    [​IMG]

    That's the A4 SoC at the bottom (1/3 the 360)...and the A5 SoC at the top. Looks to me like the A5 SoC is likely to be very close to the 360 already. Certainly more than 2/3, which would be the logical extension of moving to a dual core CPU/GPU combination.
     
  15. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    All these charts mean nothing, I want to see some Far cry draw distance screenshots.
     
  16. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    That would truly be the old school PVCF showdown. ;D

    In the meantime, how about Mark Rein saying in 2011 that Apple's hardware could potentially run something as detailed as Samaritan "in a couple of years time" if they continued increasing the iPad's graphic capability on the same scale each year as the iPad 2 vs. the original iPad?

    http://youtu.be/RSXyztq_0uM
     
  17. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    Merely trying to find an actual comparison of similar hardware that rules out variables. This is how proper testing is done, no sensationalism and vague broad claims - just don't tell Apple because it conflicts with their marketing.

    Yep, OSX runs like a turd after a few years with no fresh install. The user is told nothing just to keep the mindset of "Mac's never has problems!" alive. Once it's slow enough to frustrate them, the answer is simply to buy a new Mac. Convenient.

    What's you're talking about is software. With time newer software is no longer optimized for older hardware. The test I linked to using Ubuntu is pretty fair because does a good job of ruling out the software differences. Compilers are another matter, but in this case the difference wouldn't be large - Intel CPU's usually run comparatively worse on Linux than on Windows anyhow.

    I understand we are comparing platforms here, so the OS and overall experience should be included. But that's where the line really gets blurred... people claim the hardware to be as good simply because the games appear to look as good. Newer development techniques and bolstered system optimization are the reasons for this, as well as less than scientific comparison. Usually it's just someone saying "those graphics are up there with current console games!".

    Mark Rein is a sensationalist of proportions greater than an Apple store salesman. His statements are always purposely vague and misleading. The Samaritan demo you mentioned ran on 3 580's last year, and now according to him the same demo is running on one Kepler! Anyone in the knows that Kepler (GK104 at least) isn't going to be more than 50% faster than GTX 580. What he failed to mention was that the demo uses FXAA instead of MSAA and is rendered at 1080p rather than 1600p, or around half the overall pixels. Also, the demo has been very heavily optimized since last year. To extrapolate future hardware performance figures based on a comment from Mark Rein is a pointless endeavor. Yet, here you go:

    Clearly mr Rein was probably talking about FLOPS for the CPU/GPU of the iPad alone vs. one Xenon core. Xenon really isn't that impressive, especially only 1 of the 3 cores. If we do a proper system comparison factoring in Xenos, the 360 dwarfs the iPad. Comparing GPU's alone (since that's where most of the compute power comes from) the 360 has 18.75 times the raw compute power of an iPad 2 GPU. So the iPad 3 is potentially only 8 times slower than Xenos. If they double that every year (being generous), it will be 3 more years before it is caught. Has mr Rein stated anything about the 360 playing the same demo? He also claimed last year that in it's current settings the demo requires 2.5TFLOPS of compute power. So how much do you think has to be cut just to get the demo to run on this theoretical future iPad that is as fast as a 360?

    The other thing to consider with the new iPad is the higher resolution. Suddenly they've gone from 0.786MP to 3.15MP. Where do you think that extra potential is going to go? That's right, the new iPad will have a hard enough time running iPad 2 designed games at native resolution. So much for running that Samaritan demo now. That's not to say Epic won't release something similar... but if you think for a second that it will be anywhere near the detail and complexity, you've fallen for the marketing. There's nothing more to it.
     
  18. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    How could you possibly think you're "ruling out variables" when it's not running the same OS? Also, even though the OMAP 4460 and A5X are based on the same ARM architecture, they're customized, which means you're not ruling out all the variables there either. I simply posted a CoreMark score that rated the instruction speed per Mhz of the CPUs. Cortex A9 based chips have a higher instruction speed per Mhz than Core2 Duo, but run at lower clock speeds. However, clock speed is notoriously misleading when it comes to drawing direct conclusions to system performance using different chipsets.

    Also, I'd be interested in knowing what "sensationalism" or "broad claims" Apple is making in regards to the iPad. The comparison to the early 2006 MacBook Pro hardware is my own idea, not Apple's.

    Huh? I think something like 90% of Windows upgrades occur through new hardware purchases, so I'm not sure what you're talking about here.

    Software optimization does play an important role, especially for mobile. But the software on my Core Duo is not very far outside the timeframe for that hardware spec (maybe two years max), so in respect to having overly advanced software for the spec...nope.

    Well, there's always going to be marketing and sales motivations behind ANYTHING that you hear company reps or execs saying about their products. Doesn't matter which company or which product.

    That said, I'm not sure what's supposed to be "misleading" about Rein's comments per the original iPad compared to the 360, or the growth curve for mobile graphics per Samaritan. Epic has developed games using Unreal Engine 3 for each generation of the iPad, and the graphic performance of those games is what has sparked the conversation about iPad vs. 360. A lot of gaming industry "experts" seemed surprised when the original Epic Citadel demo was released running Unreal Engine 3 on the original iPad, so I think Rein's comments are probably fairly accurate in regards to Epic's understanding of the hardware Apple is using.

    http://youtu.be/jqYi_WRq6M4

    Rein said IF Apple's hardware continued on the same growth curve as the iPad 2 vs original iPad. We'll have to see what the benchmarks are for the latest hardware. He also said "a couple of years", which wouldn't mean he expected it to happen in 2012.

    As for the resolution, I'm sure Apple's engineers know what they're doing. The entire product is customized to work with the hardware spec...chipset, OS, and software.
     
  19. The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    I just read a headline that said:

    "New iPad poses threat to Xbox 360".

    Lolz. Even if it does pose a threat it's a moot point because the new Xbox should be out soon.
     
  20. Re: The New Ipad (Ipad 3? what the hell is the name of this thing)

    It's a threat to the traditional console model for sure. When you look at how quickly mobile chipsets are ramping up in terms of graphic performance + the overall user base vs. traditional consoles + the popularity of cloud downloads etc., it's easy to see why developers would see the potential. You're right that it's not going to matter much for the current 360, but the next Xbox isn't scheduled to launch until 2013. How many units would MS expect to sell in the first couple of years vs. iPhone + iPad sales?

    As Mike Capps of Epic said, wireless bluetooth controllers are pretty much the only thing missing right now when it comes to the iPad being both a portable and a traditional home console.