iPad Air Benchmarks Reveal 1.4 GHz A7 Processor, 2x Performance Gain Over iPad 4

[D.T.]

Remember this is only CPU performance, graphics performance shows almost no gains, so apple 2X was misleading.

It might not be showing 2X in current benchmarks, but certainly the GPU isn’t a slouch and it definitely doesn’t “show almost no gains” vs. the iPad 4/A6X

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7460/apple-ipad-air-review/4

On the GPU front, Apple does increase performance over the iPad 4 as well - despite having a narrower memory bus. The increase in performance ranges from 40 - 70% depending on workload. I suspect we’re beginning to see some of the limits of 28nm here as Apple would’ve traditionally gone for an even larger GPU.

 

[Count Blah]

So what have Intel been doing the past couple of years exactly? I know they have improved on power consumption and what not but compared to how fast things are moving in the ARM world how exactly are Intel planning on competing in the long run?

At this speed it's only a few years until Apple's own Ax SoC's are more or less equal to Intel's offerings with lower power consumption and less heat created why would Apple carry on using Intel's chips in the future? Have Intel blinded themselves with the lack of competition from AMD and completely ignored the upcoming market that is ARM or something?

Intel has been focusing on reducing power consumption, and iGPUs. Since AMD has been left in the dust, they are focusing on Nvidia and ARM. Nvidia is being targeted by making lower and mid tier offerings obsolete. Haswell has now brought the end of lower tier nvidia offerings, and the Iris Pro has started creeping into the mid tier. Broadwell's claims of 40% performance improvement should overtake the mid tier. After Broadwell, who knows.

As far as ARM, intel is focusing on power consumption with it's Clover Trail+ Atom.

The nvidia battle seems to be more mature of the two, but intel is working feverishly to bust into the tablet/phone market. In the end AMD's reduced pressure has slowed the overall performance gains from intel, but they are focusing on the other two "threats/enemies"

 

[BvizioN]

Too bad it will never be as useful as a laptop. I can't imagine Adobe re-writing all of their software to run on iOs.

If that's where the money will be, then thats where they will be.

 

[RoccoFan]

I'm not happy at how fast these expensive devices become outdated.

Wait until you see the people crying and banging their heads against walls when the iPad Pro comes out next February. Probably with a A7X (another doubling of processor speed) and hopefully 256GB of storage.

Apple did it to us before going from the 3rd Gen to the 4th Gen. They're like an abusive spouse. They let us know what they're going to do to us, but we pretend this time is different and when they hit us again, we're surprised. Not me and not this time. The name change alone is a solid indication of where they're going. I had every intention of selling my youngest child into slavery to get the iPad Air on Friday, but I've decided to take it easy and just rent him out for duct cleanings and save up the money for early next year.

I know...I know...bad daddy.

 

[Captain-Jack]

Wow, I have a third generation iPad, the Air blows it out of the water performance wise, I mean that's a LOT faster.

I mean I wasn't planning to upgrade given the 3rd gen is retina but that sort of boost is mighty tempting.

Oh the temptation.

*must* resist, *must* resist

 

[mabhatter]

So what have Intel been doing the past couple of years exactly? I know they have improved on power consumption and what not but compared to how fast things are moving in the ARM world how exactly are Intel planning on competing in the long run?

At this speed it's only a few years until Apple's own Ax SoC's are more or less equal to Intel's offerings with lower power consumption and less heat created why would Apple carry on using Intel's chips in the future? Have Intel blinded themselves with the lack of competition from AMD and completely ignored the upcoming market that is ARM or something?

Intel "x86" chips have 10x the transistors being thrown at CPU pipelines versus ARM. Because Intel is close partners with Microsoft, they can really only innovate one step ahead, and hope Microsoft follows... Which takes YEARS sometimes like with 64-bits. Until then Intel is stuck making purely "faster" versions of the same chips they made 5 years ago.. There's only so far you can get by just making faster CPUS when devs won't write using newer instructions and customers won't buy NEW software.

In the meantime, Apple is using skinny, fast ARM cores and has enough die space left to add A GB of RAM (not cache) to the CPU die which makes even more performance gains than using separate chips. Not to mention Apple gets to add co-processors that matter NOW for things like playing music and video, they aren't stuck supporting ten year old stuff devs won't use.

 

[AppleHater]

One area where I think there will be a noticeable improvement in is web page renders. I know compared to the iPhone 4s, a 5s I've seen renders web pages very fast. They just seem to pop onto the screen.

I have an iPad 3 and it doesn't feel sluggish but I'll bet the web surfing experience will feel faster if pages render as quickly as they do with the iPhone 5s. The Air also has dual Wifi antennas which should help too.

For it to fully take off, iPad needs bigger than 1gb memory. With more memory, when I scroll up and down a webpage with many images, it won't render in and out of it.

I'm hoping iPad air 2 would get it.

 

[dBeats]

I have never thought for a moment that my iPad 3 or mini was slow, so I am interested to know how these results work in real world application.

Meaning that the speed of my web browser is often determined by the speed of my ISP, so how useful is this speed in reality?

Try editing a movie or working with garage band. The benefit is for the content creation more than the consuming.

 

[whooleytoo]

the new iPad mini's specs are identical to the iPad air.exactly same just smaller screen.so they have moved from those challenges.

Except the battery, the new iPad mini's battery is probably smaller (capacity is 23.8 watt hours to the Air's 32.4). I wonder if heat dissipation is more of an issue with the mini too, in the smaller enclosure.

 

[dBeats]

For it to fully take off, iPad needs bigger than 1gb memory. With more memory, when I scroll up and down a webpage with many images, it won't render in and out of it.

You can't look at specs. You're looking at an amount of RAM and assuming it will be used in the same way that Windows, or even Android works. Both these OSs need to be super general so you can lay arbitrary code on top. iOS doesn't do that and can handle memory much better.

 

[iLLucionist]

If that's where the money will be, then thats where they will be.

Well, Flash still exists..

 

[stevelam]

I have never thought for a moment that my iPad 3 or mini was slow, so I am interested to know how these results work in real world application.

Meaning that the speed of my web browser is often determined by the speed of my ISP, so how useful is this speed in reality?

Everything else is just App's opening and closing in simple terms (which is pretty fast anyway) and then App's running as they are designed to run, regardless of processor speeds.

my ipad 3 is definitely feeling slow, compared to my iphone 5. going back and forth is a huge difference.

obviously it depends on what sites you visit, but with more and more sites packing on more javascript than ever aka needing client-sided power to run and with average site sizes going up a pretty big margin (especially any retina-friendly sites with images), the processor is now the bottleneck rather than super fast ISPs, whereas before it was the reverse.

 

[Squilly]

So it's twice as fast as the iPad 4. Yet reviews say they barely notice a performance gain between the two.

 

[Irishman]

The best product never wins the majority. That's just the way it is, and the iOS/Android war participants should understand this.

Is McDonald's hamburger better than Five Guys or Red Robin or (insert any hamburger you like)? No. But McDonald's is the best selling.

Most consumers buy based on price, and the lowest price will always win the war of numbers. The lowest price product is NEVER the best product. So competing based on who is selling better does not show who has the better product.

Looking at people with higher incomes and what THEY buy has more bearing on what the better product is, because those people are skewed to buy the better product instead of the cheaper product.

But here's the thing: In electronics, as in fast food, there is room for many success stories. Apple can continue to exist, thrive and innovate in what it does, while bargain basement brands fill in that space and thrive there.

It's not "Highlander". There can be more than one.

 

[Cyloncat]

Intel "x86" chips have 10x the transistors being thrown at CPU pipelines versus ARM. Because Intel is close partners with Microsoft, they can really only innovate one step ahead, and hope Microsoft follows... Which takes YEARS sometimes like with 64-bits. Until then Intel is stuck making purely "faster" versions of the same chips they made 5 years ago.. There's only so far you can get by just making faster CPUS when devs won't write using newer instructions and customers won't buy NEW software.

The real limiting factor for x86 processor speed is heat dissipation. Intel gets some speed improvements through processor architecture improvements, but the real CPU capacity increase comes through multiple cores. For apps (or operating systems) to get noticeably faster, they need to take better advantage of multiprocessing, and that's not only hard from a programming perspective, but also not easily adapted to many problems.

MS is certainly picking up the speed of their release cycle, with Windows 8.1 and Visual Studio 2013 out only a year after their predecessors. C# and .NET also have new tools for easier async programming and massively parallel programming (and debugging!). Nobody is standing still these days.

 

[Daalseth]

I'm getting an iPad Air, then our iPad2 goes to my wife.
I am so not showing her this article.

 

[ElectronGuru]

I'm having a tough time finding the the MaH capacity specs of the iPad air. I'm confused... didn't Schiller say the iPad air battery was smaller than previous generations and could still get the same 10 hrs because of the performance / economy of the A7?

Check the air reviews thread, lots of numbers in there. 3 & 4 are 40+ vs 32.

 

[guzzlamiamor]

I have a 5s and an iPad Mini and I am pushed to see any real difference in performance to be perfectly honest. I have kept my iPad on iOS6, though, so perhaps any extra grunt the A7 gives is partly swallowed up by iOS7 until that gets properly optimised plus the more resource hungry screen.

Maybe if you game a lot, which I don't, you will notice this more.

I have a 5 and a mini, and my 5 renders certain webpages ever so slightly faster. This is only noticeable if you are purposefully doing a side by side comparison. I am using iOS 7 on both, and the animations are very fluid on the mini. Flipping through menus, opening/closing apps, etc do not show any real noticeable difference. Neither does in app performance for light games and other basic apps. I am sure the performance boost will be great for some games, but I am not sure that it will make a huge difference for everyday use. It will allow devs to develop heavier apps, but I think it will still be a few gens before we see stuff that can utilize this power. If you were a dev writing an app why would you want to exclude all iP2, 3, and 1st gen mini users from your user base? Apple noted they are still selling the IP2 in droves hence the reason to keep it around.

 

[gnasher729]

Don't get too excited. Modern laptop CPUs have lots of optimized paths like MMX, SIMD, etc added along the way. Thats why they have 10x more transistors than these skinny little ARM chips. When you optimize software for those (and OSX and Windows do this at API level) you easily triple performance of math or calculating vectors or encoding video versus the bare CPU.

Nobody uses MMX; using it kills performance and gives you some interesting problems. SIMD is very nicely implemented on the A7 chip. And iOS can use the GPU for performance critical operations using OpenCL.

And no, they don't have 10x more transistors. A7 has over a billion transistors. Intel doesn't have 10 billion transistors in its laptop CPUs.

And goes what Apple does on iOS to easily triple performance vs. the bare CPU...

 

[Kwill]

So, by Apple's calculation, iPad Air is about. Hundred bucks faster than iPad 2.

 

[thleeal]

John Gruber just posted a review of the new iPad and he does a benchmark comparison between a couple iOS devices and a 2010 MacBook Air. Based on the Geekbench results, the model he's using probably has a 1.4 or 1.6 GHz C2D. Still, the iPad delivering a ~180% performance increase over a laptop processor made to work with actual moving fans and greater thermal headroom is absolutely freaking nuts...

Thank you.

 

[gatearray]

A great performance gain over the iPad 4th gen, a not-so-great improvement over the 5S.
These things are really getting powerful. And at that clock speed!!

Imagine if it ran at Sammy's clock speeds. Would please benchmarks and electric companies alike

Yep, faster clock speeds to run a bloated pig of an OS and faked benchmarks FTW!

 

[Konrad9]

So, in the span of just 19 Months the iPad performance jumped 561% from 263 to 1465?

That is just insane. And people complain about Apple not innovating.

EDIT: If you extrapolate that in the future, we would have an iPad in May 2015 that has a geekbench single-Processor score of 8218,65. I know, it doesn't work that way. But think about it ...

in·no·vate verb \ˈi-nə-ˌvāt\
: to do something in a new way : to have new ideas about how something can be done

Making a better chip is not innovating, it's a technological improvement. You basically just said that having a bigger hard drive should be considered innovating.

Making the UI more intuitive is innovating, implementing new features is innovating.

 

[bbeagle]

In that case iPhones are the hamburgers of the high end market because they sell the most.

iPhones are more like the Haagen Das of the high end market.

 

[Klae17]

The car loses its resale value, but not its use value. Next years car isn't twice as fast. Last years car is good for another ten years of use. The iPad 3 won't last for much longer, now that every new iPad will have an A7 or better.

The tablet loses it's resale value, but not its use value. Tablets are good for a few years! Even the ipad 1 is running. iPads don't go bad because there is a new one.

$500 for 3 years lets say. Or $20,000 for ten years. WHY NOT BOTH?!