Apple iPad 2 GPU Performance Explored: PowerVR SGX543MP2 Benchmarked

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• mech0r - Friday, March 18, 2011 - link

  "I suspect that number is still wildly inflated and falling fast."
  
  Wtf are you Steve Jobs himself? Or did you just say that cuz stevie told you that?
  
  why do you "suspect" and not go "research" before repeating mindlessly what your cult leader tells you

• tipoo - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link

  Possibly 3G/non 3G, and first generation being tested again too.

• BrooksT - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link

  What do you want? The iPad is >80% market share in a market Apple created. iPad 2 is kind of a big release.
  
  Do you think Anand or elsewhere should ignore market share, history, and user interest when deciding amount of coverage? Does avoiding "favoritism" mean giving equal amounts of coverage to Intel and Via CPUs?

• Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link

  There are three different models that we're testing (AT&T, Verizon and WiFi) and we've got a second WiFi that we borrowed so we can speed up battery life testing. Apple doesn't actually sample us most of the time and all Apple review samples go back after ~30 days (and we never accept money for reviews so that's out of the discussion as well). Because we don't get sampled, we have to do a lot of parallel testing in order to still deliver timely reviews. Not to mention that given the baseband issues we've seen in the past with Apple and other recently released smartphones, we want to have as many datapoints as possible to make sure we discover any issues that may exist.
  
  The PowerVR SGX 543MP2 is a particularly interesting GPU. It's something we'll see variants of in other SoCs going forward. We would've shown the same excitement and rush to test for any other platform that it debuted on.
  
  As far as the pictures go. We have different folks do the photos for each article. Some products are easier to photograph in a way that looks cooler. I'd argue that the Atrix and Nexus S shots are just as good as what we've published here.
  
  Take care,
  Anand

• chrnochime - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link

  Anand,
  
  Do you know or could you tell us which other tablet that's coming up in 2011 would sport a variant of the SGX 543MP2(or 4)? Now that your test shows the GPU is actually substantially quicker than the Tegra2, I would want to wait for some other tablet that sports a larger resolution.
  
  Thanks.

• metafor - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link

  To date, I don't believe any have been announced. IIRC, TI is the only other SoC manufacturer with the 543MP in their roadmap and that won't be until the OMAP5 series next year.
  
  But that doesn't necessarily mean no one will catch up to the iPad 2 in GPU performance. Many manufacturers (Samsung, ST) are using ARM's Mali core, which if scaled up could be competitive. nVidia has their next-generation Geforce ULP coming in Tegra 3 and Qualcomm has their Adreno 220 later this year, so there are plenty of players.

• KoolAidMan1 - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link

  Get over yourself.
  
  The iPad sold 15 million units in a year and the iPad 2 will likely double that. No other tablet will come anywhere close to that. It is obvious why Anand is covering that device.
  
  It is also funny that you refer to the iPad 2 as "junk" when it is superior to the Xoom and every other tablet out there in terms of hardware, physical form factor, and application selection.

• winterspan - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link

  How is this a hard concept to grasp? It has nothing to do with Apple paying anyone anything. The fact of the matter is that the iPad has and the iPad2 will sell tens of millions of units, far more than all the android tablets put together so far.
  
  It's a pretty simple business case:
  
  1) $$$ = number of eyeballs looking at website articles (and hence advertising banners)
  2) number of eyeballs = popularity of each article x number of articles
  3) popularity of articles = popularity of article topic (product being previewed/reviewed)
  4) iPad popularity > individual Android tablet popularity
  5) iPad content popularity > other tablet content popularity
  6) iPad content revenue > other tablet content revenue

• EarthCore - Sunday, March 13, 2011 - link

  Hmm, I'd say it's either favoritism or incompetence Anandtech? Which excuse are you going to choose? Why?
  
  Well, here goes a few things I noticed off the bat.
  
  I grabbed the GL benchmark app, and here a few indicators that it needs to be re-worked for the Xoom:
  
  The Xoom has 27 native Open GL extensions (MOTODEV > Products > XOOM™ MZ600)
  
  the GL Benchmark app only found 21 (GLBenchmark Result Details of Motorola Xoom)
  
  So off the bat with the app not using all available OpenGL extensions for honeycomb or for the Nvidia platform I'd say that it's "off."
  
  Secondly, the app even incorrectly reads the screen size at 1280 x 752.
  
  So right now I say these needs to be updated before I got too crazy with the results.
  
  I didn't do a cross reference of the utilized libs over the ones "left on the table" but if I get a few minutes I will. But, if these guys at Anandtech are supposed to be "pros" at this, why the glaring omission?
  
  I would like to see Engadget...oops, I mean Anandtech, update this article to reflect this and redo these tests when the playing field is balanced.

• kmmatney - Sunday, March 13, 2011 - link

  Get over yourself. Motorola Xoom is actually rendering at 1280x752, since the System Bar in Honeycomb is always taking up screen space.