During Apple’s media event yesterday to unveil the new iPad, Cupertino claimed that the A5X chip inside their latest tablet was twice as fast as the Apple A5 and four times as powerful as Nvidia’s Tegra 3 processor in terms of graphics performance. Nvidia, however, isn’t drinking the Apple flavored Kool-Aid without first seeing some proof.
Nvidia spokesperson Ken Brown noted that while it was “certainly flattering” that Apple called out the Tegra 3 during their press event, the figures are essentially lifeless without benchmarks to back them up.
“We don’t have the benchmark information,” Brown said. “We have to understand what the application was that was used. Was it one or a variety of applications? What drivers were used? There are so many issues to get into with benchmark.”
It’s unlikely that Apple will release any further information to back up their claims. Instead, most will have to wait until late next week when tech sites release their reviews complete with comparisons between the two.
In the meantime, we can compare the A5 chip found in the iPad 2 with the Tegra 3 from ASUS’ Transformer Prime. When speaking solely on graphics performance, the iPad 2 did beat out the Transformer Prime in SlashGear’s GLBenchmark 2.1. AnandTech ran a similar story in December that compared the same tablets. In every test, the iPad 2 came out on top; sometimes by a pretty large margin, other times by just a few frames per second.
Based on the fact that the A5 has been proven to be faster (by how much, is debatable), there’s no doubt in our minds that the A5X will push the next iPad even higher in comparison benchmarks against the Tegra 3. But, four times as fast… we’ll have to wait and see if that proves to be true.
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