CPU & GPU
Those who haven't checked Anandtechs' review of the iPad3 I
suggest you do, it’s full of juicy information.
Having settled all this info in my mind, it’s quite easy to
draw a clear picture.
The Tegra3 is a chip-set that jumped most competitors with
such an early entry to quad mobile CPUs, the only other quad in the market is
the PS Vita SOC, both quad A9, early worries about memory bandwidth/L2 cache
are unfounded simply because ARM A9's memory controller can't keep up with
more.
Snapdragon 4 introduced dual memory channel and major
optimization and performance per core, however its advantage is offset by the
lack of cores, it’s a good design for quad but right now it’s excellent cores
will still be stalled by multi-tasking and amazing memory bandwidth will go to
waste .
Right now Tegra3 is
still the best Mobile CPU you can have, better than the A5x and S4, however the
major let down of the Tegra 3 is it's GPU .
Nvidia claimed 12 cores GPU on the T3 but that's simply the
number of SIMDs and not physical cores,ARM also names its SIMDs as core, but
this only confuses customers, Nvidia will use this naming scheme to counter
Apple claims, like Asus already ‘responded on twitter.
ARM SGX543 MP series has physical core scaling, but its only
8 SIMDs per Core, vs 12 on the Tegra 3, 8 on Adreno225 and 5 on Mali-400, the
A5 has 2 cores and hence 16 SIMDs while the A5x has 4 cores and hence 32 SIMDs.
In reality the Tegra3
GPU falls a little short of the iPad 2 GPU, while it beats Mali-400 and
Adreno225 in most situations but not all areas, Nvidia extracted all they
can from this GPU by some aggressive drivers optimization and hacks this is how
they achieved their 3x Tegra2 claim, ie: its already optimized don't expect
much room here
Nvidia's GPU is really disappointing but not a disaster it
just doesn't have a lot of overhead, right now its still the fastest GPU for
android and has the quad to back it up in case an app is T3 optimized, the
quads can add console quality gameplay additions like ragdoll, physics and
particles but might not improve FPS (this will require the engine to be written
from grounds up for multi core and i doubt devs will be inclined).
The iPad3 GPU is massively powerful, a testament to the PS
Vita's GPU, however unlike the Vita its power is wasted on those pixels and
hence games will benefit from it but not the 2x jump from current
iPad2/iPhone4s games, like infinity blade 2 shows it only managed to increase
the resolution into 1.4x without losing frame rate, so yes most 3D games on the
iPad3 will not be retina boosted , why do i keep bringing up iPad? Because iOS
is still the leader when it comes to mobile gaming and most games we get on
Android are ports, the future of iOS games will draw the future of Android
games.
All this makes me conclude
the following.
Android's main appeal is still the OS and what you can do
with it and multi-tasking, which translates into the main appeal for Tegra3, it’s
ridiculous to even think is quad cores cannot benefit such a heavily
multi-threaded OS.
Android is still not the best platform for gaming but
whether we like it or not the best ground for gaming is Tegrazone simply
because we have Nvidia pushing/bribing developers in this direction. If you are
buying an Android device right now the best you can do is Nvidia Tegra3 but
damn you Nvidia for not being more generous.
It's been the case for ages, asymmetry between CPU and GPU
power, Xbox360 had a more power GPU
against its CPU, PS3 had the CPU against its GPU, Apple A5x has its GPU against
last year CPU, the only SOC that satisfies both angles is PS Vita with its quad
CPU and quad GPU but because Sony has to worry about the product life cycle
which is over 4 years.
So you can see Tegra3
has the CPU against its GPU, its not really breaking the norms in here, its
business as usual.
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