AppleInsider Staff
A post from Primate Labs, developer of online benchmarking website Geekbench, reveals what are believed to be the first scores of Apple's newest 9.7-inch iPad, showing that the performance of the tablet's A6X processor more than doubles the composite score of the third generation iPad.
According to Primate Labs' John Poole (via MacRumors), a device with the identifier "iPad3,4" logged a benchmark test on Sunday, with the device boasting an A6X chip clocked at 1.39GHz paired with 1GB of memory. This is similar to the die architecture found in the iPhone 5's A6 SoC, but that processor runs at a lower 1.3GHz to conserve energy.
Besides the higher clock speed, the A6X appears to be leveraging quad-core graphics, compared to the triple-core configuration seen in the iPhone 5, to power the high-resolution Retina display.
Overall, the fourth-generation iPad achieved a Geekbench score of 1757, outperforming the iPhone 5 by ten percent and more than doubling the scores seen with the third-generation iPad and iPad 2.
Apple unveiled the refreshed 9.7-inch tablet at a special event last week that also saw the debut of the 7.9-inch smaller iPad mini.
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41 Comments
Here I was loving the speed and fluidity of my 5 and I discover my pre-ordered iPad 4 will put it to shame? God bless Apple's marketing department for making these devices seem so quick to us all!
"...showing that the performance of the tablet's A6X processor more than doubles the composite score of the third generation iPad." Just as Tim Cook predicted.
Seriously: still caring about power statistics?
I thought these days were long over.
At least for anything not being a PC. Sorry, but I fail to see the consumer benefit of these statistics. As long as it does what it needs to do and offers new possibilities for developers, who cares about how much more power it has?
@pinolo - as you say, it all depends on doing what it needs to do. You have to remember that these days there are a lot of people who buy an iPad to play games on. It has become a serious mobile gaming platform. As soon as the new possibilities are realised by the developers, users of the older iPads will start to find more and more of the new titles to be either unavailable or perform poorly on their hardware. When this happens only 6 months after release, this is a great way to anger a proportion of the current customer base. To add to these woes, Apple's refurb store is now throwing out the iPad I bought 6 months ago at a substantial discount, causing it's second-hand value to be heavily eroded. Bang goes the low(ish) cost upgrade path. Just another perspective - Yes, it's a bit "PC", no, I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but there is a proportion of the user base that are slightly rubbed the wrong way by this behaviour. I know tech moves on, but this is silly. My 3 year old iMac i5 is coming up for an upgrade with the new ones this year, but at the same price point, the new i5 isn't going to have double the performance of my current one, and that's after 3 years of progress, not 6 months. Short changed? Yeah... a bit... Live with it? I guess so.
The iPad 4 looks very tempting but I'm still going to hold out for the iPad 5 hoping it has an IGZO display and crazy battery life. I'm really hoping that Apple focuses on reducing the latency for the touch screen so pen input is real-time. Right now, I find all tablets have a slight lag from fast pen inputs.