Sunday, 13 March 2011

iPad 2 benchmarks trounce Xoom

iPad 2 benched against Xoom

Early, detailed benchmarks of the iPad 2's performance have provided a surprise win by Apple over the Motorola Xoom. Despite NVIDIA's reputation for fast graphics, AnandTech found the PowerVR SGX543MP2 in the iPad 2 was in some cases several times faster in Imagination Technologies' GLBenchmark 2.0 than the Xoom's Tegra 2 chip. While the Xoom has to drive a higher 1280x800 resolution, the difference wouldn't have been enough to claim the edge.
Web tests, which leaned more heavily on the processor, also favored Apple. Both Apple's A5 and NVIDIA's Tegra 2 are ARM Cortex-A9 processors, but the iPad 2 loaded pages significantly faster. The benchmark was both a demonstration of whatever optimizations were made to the A5 as well as to the Nitro JavaScript engine. For Google, the loss might be felt deeper as it has built the reputation of its Chrome desktop browser, which Android 3.0 shares, on speed.

The performance increase may have been more impressive given Apple's hardware performance. Its A5 is clocked at about 900MHz, lower than the 1GHz on the Tegra 2 in the Xoom. Mobile Geekbench 2 tests comparing the iPad 2 to the original supported Apple's claims that the new model's A5 was about twice as quick in raw math.

The tests don't necessarily reflect performance in every condition and could see Motorola's tablet run faster if an app were properly optimized. However, at least in raw performance, the benchmarking would give Apple a performance lead not just over the Xoom but over every Android 3.0 tablet using the same 1GHz Tegra 2, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.




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