But in the tablet race, the Tegra II is the only line of comparison because Honeycomb was built around it and Android is the only real competitor so far in this field. Comparable OMAPs (to even the A5) are still several months out. The Adreno 300 GPUs (Qualcomm) also look really good but may be a bit latter.
Not really. Qualcomm has silicon out there (TouchPad), Exynos is out there (Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1) as well as the OMAP 4430 (playbook, droid 3, upcoming bionic). Just because they don't same a comparable GPU doesn't mean they aren't comparable SoCs, especially in the areas of CPU performance. GPU performance is a subset of a SoC's function.
I don't think so. Apple recognizes the single biggest draw to iOS right now is gaming. The 543MP2 gave a HUGE boost in gaming performance. With Sony's NGP sporting a quad core A9 design with the 543MP4, Apple knows what it has to shoot for to compete on what it sees as its primary point of competition. Mobile gaming.
You think gaming is what is winning Apple the mobile war? That's an aspect of it, but
far from the only, much less primary. The draw of it is the design, ecosystem, app selection etc.
While the iPhone competes with the DS, 3DS and PSP variants, they have overlapping market segments. Neither is a subset of the other. What they are doing is leeching casual gamers from those platforms and adding new players to the market. There will always be a contingent of hardcore gamers that demand physical buttons and other amenities that only a dedicated device will offer. Thus, while good graphics are essential for those platforms, they are only a nicety on the mobile phone platforms. Game selection will trump AAA titles (at least for now). For instance, what big graphical title can you name for iOS? Most people might manage Infinity Blade. But for most people it's cut the rope, angry birds, fruit ninja, etc. Small time wasters with undemanding graphics.
On top of that, the mobile phone platforms will necessary lag the gaming platforms because they'll have more levels of abstraction between them and the hardware. They'll have to have a lot more than a matching 543MP4+ core to match the Vita's performance.
Finally, people don't follow mobile phone platforms for "killer app" games like they do dedicated consoles. For instance, Mario is a huge draw for Nintendo systems, whereas Uncharted will move some Vitas (me included here). No one buys a mobile phone thinking "Oooh, this game is coming out so I'll buy that." A phone means much more to a person and those users also have a reasonable expectation of every game they could want being available on their platform. That certainly makes the most sense for app developers, so until mobile phone developers see enough of a market to justify acquiring exclusives on mobile phone games, games will be a feature and not a purchase decider.
Apple increased it because the 535 was pushed really hard on the iPhone 4 and the iPad as it was. I am amazed at how much faster many graphics operations (like fills and blits) are on the iPhone 3G S when compared to the iPhone 4. The 543MP2 was a requirement to maintain the mobile gaming edge. If Apple does jump to a Retina display, they will need to offset all those darn pixels with something. Heading to a 28nm will really help the power thing so they may be able to increase performance while maintaining the same power envelope.
It's not clear that Apple has prioritized the gaming edge. They certainly want to stay on top in terms of the ARM core they use, but we don't even know for sure they want to go retina on the iPad, so their intent there remains to be seen.
544 adds full Direct X compliance but no updates to OpenGL.
That's what I recall reading, but the wikipedia page showed identical DirectX 9c compliance and I couldn't be bothered to look further into it.
