A4 and Single Core A5

The A5 has a much improved GPU over the A4. I think that's the key difference. When playing video, it should be played using the GPU, so even if the CPU on the A4 and single core A5 were clocked the same, the A5 should have a big advantage.

To elaborate what eliehass said - in regards to H264 encoded movies the AppleTV uses hardware in the GPU to decode the movies.

As the graphics chip in the A5 is much more powerful then the A4 (Apple claims the A5 iPad2 had 9x the graphics capabilities of the A4 iPad). It should be more than capable of decoding high bitrate H264 files. Only time will tell as people begin getting their hands on them.

I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple left the dual core graphics chip in for the ATV3 (While making the processor part single core) since the graphics portion is what's important to the ATV.

tech324 said:

I wonder how much different the single core A5 and the A4 will actually be between the Apple TV 2 and 3? I know the A5 is a newer architecture but I wonder how it will play 1080p video? Some of us have huge 1080 video files and I am not so sure the A5 will run them smoothly.

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A5 (single core) will run 1080p smoothly, the GPU is a dual core, the CPU would be pretty much idle.

My ATV2 with the latest software plays full BD 1080 files (25-30 GB) perfectly, but with 720 output (obviously). So I seriously doubt the ATV3 is going to struggle with full size BD files with an even more powerful CPU.