On May 17, 7:59 pm, Fabrizio Giudici <[email protected]> wrote: > I was surprised to read some comments about the NVidia CEO interview in > which he asserts that "Android tables are not selling well" because of > their costs.
Most Android tablets shipping or announced use the Nvidia Tegra2 CPU / graphic chip. When benchmarked against the iPad 2 graphic chip - the dual core PowerVR SGX 543MP2 - it got beaten handily: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4216/apple-ipad-2-gpu-performance-explored-powervr-sgx543mp2-benchmarked/2. Now I know that the Xoom has about 30% more pixels, and the OS are different, and iOS has had OpenGL support longer than Android, but the iPad 2 was 2-4 times faster in the "show real environment tests". It also absolutely kills with anti-aliasing which - in these tests - it ran with no or minimal loss of frame rate (the tests weren't run on the Xoom). Side note: Mark Rein of Unreal Engine fame thinks the mobile OpenGL drivers are all crap, so here's hoping for Android (http://gizmodo.com/5789093/the-near+future-of-mobile-gaming-is-going- to-be-pretty-epic). I expect a lot of games on iPad 2 to run with anti- aliasing enabled if it really is "for free", probably looking better than their Android counterparts. PowerVR, like ARM, doesn't do hardware, they develop graphic core IP and have other people build chip with these cores (like Apple did with twice already now). They are very power efficient and were used in the ill-fated Sega Dreamcast (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR). I am tempted to frame this approach in the same way as "Intel vs ARM" - power-hungry desktop chips (NVidia) compete with efficient mobile chip cores that can be customized by vendors (PowerVR) and beat the invading desktop guys. Although a new Tegra chip is scheduled to ship in the second half this year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra#Tegra_.28Kal-El.29_series), it'll supposedly be a quad-core chip, so I'm not sure if it'll be used in tablets that widely. So I think next year will bring another round in this battle: A6 vs. "Tegra Wayne" which is supposedly 10x faster than Tegra 2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra#Tegra_2_series). Apple claimed the A5 graphic was up to 9x faster than the A4 - the benchmarks showed about a 7x speed increase - and I expect the A6 to be at least 8x faster than A5: Half of that power will go into powering the iPad Retina display at 2048x1536, the other half so that the iPad is at least twice as fast as its predecessor. Ever since the iPhone, mobile tech seems to be stuck on fast- forward. :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
