iPad 2

[metafor]

As far as I can tell Mobile Safari will continue loading a webpage when you switch to another app, too (though it won't instantly render it, so when you switch back you still see the contents where you left off for a moment).

iPhone 4 or 3Gs? On my 3Gs, it stops loading when I open a new tab or go to the home screen.

But that's not what I meant. What I was saying is that a tabbed browser, on its own, can consume a lot of memory. I don't think it's true that the amount of memory is less important on iOS because it doesn't do "real multitasking". However, I do think that with today's applications Android shouldn't have any problems with 512 MiB either.

I think a lot of the proposed augmented reality applications will change that. But I agree, 512MB probably will be plentiful.

 

[ltcommander.data]

They can't hide the amount of memory or the actual available bandwidth from developers. And people like iFixIt have made it quite clear that they will take the package apart and put the dies under a microscope, where they will inevitably find the manufacturer's markings.

Given the GM iOS 4.3 seed has been put up, I'm surprised someone hasn't already leaked the RAM spec and perhaps the GPU and CPU being used.

 

[Erinyes]

This isnt related to the Ipad 2 specifically, but when Apple announced Facetime at the iphone 4 launch, they said it would be an open standard and would be released for others to use as well (and if im not mistaken, they said "soon"). Now unless i completely missed it, its been 9 months and we have nothing

 

[mboeller]

It isn't, the IMR reads all data on each pass including all that that is frustum, back face or sub pixel culled, this is typically around 3x more data than post culling, TBDRs only read post culled data during the rasterisation pass.

Aren't the vertex also transformed and compressed? At least that's what I have understood from the patents.

Let me be clear on this, analysis of _current_ high end desktop apps shows that a modern TBDR architecture will still typically consume less bandwidth than a modern EZ IMR architecture and gap is probably only going to widen going forwards.

IMHO now the promised article about the bandwidth consumption of your GPUs would be handy, or?

 

[eastmen]

I went to the verizon store with my buddy so he can get a new phone (damn verizon's plans are expensive !) . At the store they have the Ipad , Galaxy tab , Xoom all next to each other.

The galaxy tab is okay but nothing special its basicly a hacked nook color. I was more interested in the xoom and the ipad. Now grant it , its a first gen ipad but everything on the xoom was faster esp web browsing.

judging from the gap between these two products and the released information from apple on the ipad 2 i have to say , i don't know if the ipad 2 will be the leap over other tablets that the ipad was when it first launched. The xoom is a really good piece of hardware and if we see tablets based on tegra 3 at the end of summer the ipad 2 will be extremely out classed

 

[Lazy8s]

iOS Safari does continue loading a tab after you switch to another as long as you don't wait too long before switching back.

Other web browsers downloadable from the App Store with basically identical performance to Safari also do away with the annoying occasional memory flush/page reload issue of Safari.

 

[Pressure]

I went to the verizon store with my buddy so he can get a new phone (damn verizon's plans are expensive !) . At the store they have the Ipad , Galaxy tab , Xoom all next to each other.

The galaxy tab is okay but nothing special its basicly a hacked nook color. I was more interested in the xoom and the ipad. Now grant it , its a first gen ipad but everything on the xoom was faster esp web browsing.

judging from the gap between these two products and the released information from apple on the ipad 2 i have to say , i don't know if the ipad 2 will be the leap over other tablets that the ipad was when it first launched. The xoom is a really good piece of hardware and if we see tablets based on tegra 3 at the end of summer the ipad 2 will be extremely out classed

You shouldn't really be buying a tablet because of the specifications but the user experience.
It is supposed to be easy to pick up and use and as long as "bad performance" doesn't rear its ugly face, everybody will not care whether it got 512 MB or 1 GB of ram.

Of course the original iPad will seem slow pitted against these newer tablets but they should be compared to the iPad 2, seeing as it will probably be the first "next-generation" tablet available on the market.

 

[JohnH]

judging from the gap between these two products and the released information from apple on the ipad 2 i have to say , i don't know if the ipad 2 will be the leap over other tablets that the ipad was when it first launched. The xoom is a really good piece of hardware and if we see tablets based on tegra 3 at the end of summer the ipad 2 will be extremely out classed

I think that depends on how much difference you think 4 vs 2 CPU cores is really going to make, it's also worth pointing out that from the information available so far it appears that graphically the T3 may be quite weak by comparison...

 

[eastmen]

You shouldn't really be buying a tablet because of the specifications but the user experience.
It is supposed to be easy to pick up and use and as long as "bad performance" doesn't rear its ugly face, everybody will not care whether it got 512 MB or 1 GB of ram.

Of course the original iPad will seem slow pitted against these newer tablets but they should be compared to the iPad 2, seeing as it will probably be the first "next-generation" tablet available on the market.

It depends , the higher ram amount can help it in many area's .


Personaly for me these things are a way for the companys to get you stuck in their eco system.

I've decided on going to the windows route later this year with tablets. But i think for my mother the xoom would be a better choice than the ipad 2 .

The great thing about the xoom is that its 32GB and has an sd expansion slot. I can load her up with all her music /books and a bunch of her fav movies on the sd ard and she'd have 32GB for applications and games.

The ipad doesn't really look that great in comparison when apple wants $100 for each storage space upgrade

I think that depends on how much difference you think 4 vs 2 CPU cores is really going to make, it's also worth pointing out that from the information available so far it appears that graphically the T3 may be quite weak by comparison...

For something like andriod that multitasks it may be a very big improvement. Like above if i get a xoom or lets say a xoom 2 with a tegra 3 , my mother will be able to multi task better. She can have music on web browsers open and a book on the nook app and switch between them , all of this should be instant because each of them can be off loaded to other cores.

Future tablets might also have tv hook ups with extended displays allowing my mother to have a movie on while switching between other applications .

And then there are the games. Simple games will give way to more complex and better looking games. Angry birds on the galaxy tab had some slow down issues that weren't there playing on the xoom even when i had pandora streaming music .

For people who only ever do one thing at a time the ipad 2 might be enough to get them to stop going. But it seem sthat each time the hardware in these phones increases in power people and developers find more things to do with them.

On the g1 from t mobile i wouldn't have been able to have pandora running while playing a game and switching between multiple tabs on the andriod browser. but with my epic 4g its handling that pretty well. i


Like I said , for me its a windows tablet. It will help me alot at work as long as it has a stylus and i already have alot of money invested in the windows eco system. my steam account alone has more money spent in it than the purchase price an ipad and while Crysis 2 and dragon age 1 wont play well on a bobcat tablet or Llano tablet later this year , Kotor 1 and half life 2 will run well along with dozens of games i've purchased on steam through the years.


The ipad 2 looks like a stop gap product. Its very clear that they wanted to have something else ready but now that the andriod tablets are caught up and in some ways better than the original ipad they needed to release something now. Will apple refresh in the fall ? Will andriod companys refresh in the fall ? Will the andriod refreshes be more compelling than the ipad 2 ?

I would think devices created in sept will be much better all around than a device released in march and if a xoom 2 is sitting next to a ipad 2 this fall at the verizon store or at the apple store many people may choose the xoom 2 over the ipad , esp if they are one of the huge amount of people who own andriod phones.

Isupply is putting the xoom at $360 to manufacture and while some things like the screen and the blue tooth / wifi , 4g adapters wont drop in price the nand , ddr2 cpu will drop in price and they could allways cut half the flash out of it because of the sd card.

We could easily see a xoom 1 hitting $400 or so at retail and as low as $200 with contract at some places while a xoom 2 slots in at the $700 mark this fall.

By looking at some numbers they are pegging the 10inch screen at $140. The screen in the galaxy tab which is 7 inch was said to have cost $57 5 months ago. So we may seem some tegra 2 tablets in the fall at very low prices.

Can the ipad 2 really starve off the competition or will this be an area where apple starts to fall behind ?


The only thing that can really stop andriod is the fragmentation thats going on both on the software front and hardware frunt.

 

[Grall]

Let me be clear on this, analysis of _current_ high end desktop apps shows that a modern TBDR architecture will still typically consume less bandwidth than a modern EZ IMR architecture and gap is probably only going to widen going forwards.

Couple that with when you're doing a Z-pre-pass on an IMR GPU, that's all you're doing. You're not doing any actual rendering, you're wasting cycles doing work that the TBDR doesn't have to do, and your pixel shaders, texturing units and so on are all just sitting there rolling their thumbs.

 

[Ailuros]

For something like andriod that multitasks it may be a very big improvement. Like above if i get a xoom or lets say a xoom 2 with a tegra 3 , my mother will be able to multi task better. She can have music on web browsers open and a book on the nook app and switch between them , all of this should be instant because each of them can be off loaded to other cores.

Future tablets might also have tv hook ups with extended displays allowing my mother to have a movie on while switching between other applications .

How can you know out front which device will multi-task better is beyond me. I'm not blown out of my socks with the display of the iPad2 myself but that hasn't anything to do with how the device actually performs/behaves in real time.

If you would have had the chance to compare the iPad2 in real-time against whatever else I could understand what you're trying to say, but at this point it's merely theory.

Oh and just for the record watching a movie on a mobile device is mostly an affair of the video decoding hw.

And then there are the games. Simple games will give way to more complex and better looking games. Angry birds on the galaxy tab had some slow down issues that weren't there playing on the xoom even when i had pandora streaming music .

iPad2 might be a let down in terms of display resolution (at least IMO), but if anything the graphics block is anything but weak. In fact it's the fastest config that will be available on mobile devices in March. If the GPU block is clocked at the same frequency as in the S5PC11x then it'll mean an at least 2.5x graphics performance increase compared to the latter.

To avoid misunderstandings I'm not trying to influence anyone on his buying decisions. But since you obviously have a chance to have a quick glimpse on how each device acts/reacts in real time, it sounds wiser to also judge an iPad2 in real time.

Last but not least the criticism and bickering against Apple's design decisions are always there. The higher the popularity the stronger the criticism. For the amount of criticism Apple is receiving they're obviously doing something right and no there's nowhere any sort of perfection.

I found the following article quite amusing: http://semiaccurate.com/2011/02/22/ipad-game-console/ The title is a tad misleading, but there are quite a few good points in that one.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Why would it be less useful just because VS handling isn't much different?

I was wrong on the less useful...I misspoke. I do feel that it seems to me that the best way to take advantage of a TBDR would be to dedicate all of its resources to Rasterization, HSR (z and stencil testing), and pixel shading (lots of ALU's and TMU's available to it).

Vertex data and modifications of it (deformation, skinning, tessellation, etc...) belong as close to the physics+animation side of things as possible IMHO and thus, if you have something like CELL nearby, on the CPU.

 

[JohnH]

For something like andriod that multitasks it may be a very big improvement. Like above if i get a xoom or lets say a xoom 2 with a tegra 3 , my mother will be able to multi task better. She can have music on web browsers open and a book on the nook app and switch between them , all of this should be instant because each of them can be off loaded to other cores.

You're confusing running things in the back ground with switching between apps i.e. you mum won't be reading a book and browsing the web at exactly the same time. In above scenario you only have two active processes, one for playing music and one for browsing or reading a book. Further, playing music and reading a book are hardly heavy MIPs consumers, they could both easly run on a single core without any noticable impact.

Future tablets might also have tv hook ups with extended displays allowing my mother to have a movie on while switching between other applications .

The movie is played using dedicated HW with minimal CPU interaction, you don't need another CPU core for it, in fact you don't want another CPU core active for this as it will consume more power.

And then there are the games. Simple games will give way to more complex and better looking games. Angry birds on the galaxy tab had some slow down issues that weren't there playing on the xoom even when i had pandora streaming music .

Complex games required higher performance garphics, as I already said T3 is appears to be quite weak in this respect.

For people who only ever do one thing at a time the ipad 2 might be enough to get them to stop going. But it seem sthat each time the hardware in these phones increases in power people and developers find more things to do with them.

On the g1 from t mobile i wouldn't have been able to have pandora running while playing a game and switching between multiple tabs on the andriod browser. but with my epic 4g its handling that pretty well. i

Again you're confusing switching between tasks with actually running things simultaneously.

The ipad 2 looks like a stop gap product. Its very clear that they wanted to have something else ready but now that the andriod tablets are caught up and in some ways better than the original ipad they needed to release something now. Will apple refresh in the fall ? Will andriod companys refresh in the fall ? Will the andriod refreshes be more compelling than the ipad 2 ?

In what way is it a stop gap product? It will proably equal or better anything available untl the end of the year, even then it will probably still be the better tablet for graphics/games.

I would think devices created in sept will be much better all around than a device released in march and if a xoom 2 is sitting next to a ipad 2 this fall at the verizon store or at the apple store many people may choose the xoom 2 over the ipad , esp if they are one of the huge amount of people who own andriod phones.

Isupply is putting the xoom at $360 to manufacture and while some things like the screen and the blue tooth / wifi , 4g adapters wont drop in price the nand , ddr2 cpu will drop in price and they could allways cut half the flash out of it because of the sd card.

We could easily see a xoom 1 hitting $400 or so at retail and as low as $200 with contract at some places while a xoom 2 slots in at the $700 mark this fall.

By looking at some numbers they are pegging the 10inch screen at $140. The screen in the galaxy tab which is 7 inch was said to have cost $57 5 months ago. So we may seem some tegra 2 tablets in the fall at very low prices.

Can the ipad 2 really starve off the competition or will this be an area where apple starts to fall behind ?

You're ignoring the 2-3 quater lead they have over these "superior" tablets which means the ipad2 will already have a huge installed base of users and applications that take advantage of it by the time the other tablets arrive.

The only thing that can really stop andriod is the fragmentation thats going on both on the software front and hardware frunt.

Fragmentation is already a huge issue, it's only only going to get worse.

 

[Ailuros]

Vertex data and modifications of it (deformation, skinning, tessellation, etc...) belong as close to the physics+animation side of things as possible IMHO and thus, if you have something like CELL nearby, on the CPU.

I wouldn't know why anyone would prefer to dump programmable tessellation on the CPU today, but that aside how many chances do future devices have to see another CELL implementation anyway?

 

[Panajev2001a]

I wouldn't know why anyone would prefer to dump programmable tessellation on the CPU today, but that aside how many chances do future devices have to see another CELL implementation anyway?

Next to nil...

 

[Xmas]

iPhone 4 or 3Gs? On my 3Gs, it stops loading when I open a new tab or go to the home screen.

iPhone 4. As I said, it seems to load in the background, but it still needs to render the page when you switch back so there is a slight delay.

I think a lot of the proposed augmented reality applications will change that. But I agree, 512MB probably will be plentiful.

Interesting, I have never thought of augmented reality as a memory hog. What in particular do you have in mind that would need a lot of memory?

For something like andriod that multitasks it may be a very big improvement. Like above if i get a xoom or lets say a xoom 2 with a tegra 3 , my mother will be able to multi task better. She can have music on web browsers open and a book on the nook app and switch between them , all of this should be instant because each of them can be off loaded to other cores.

Future tablets might also have tv hook ups with extended displays allowing my mother to have a movie on while switching between other applications .

Apart from the web browser these apps are all quite light on the CPU (audio and video decoding can be done by dedicated units), switching between them should be instant on a single core as well. Look at the desktop, the biggest benefit you get from 4, 6, 8 cores isn't faster task switching but individual, compute-intensive applications executing faster.

Like I said , for me its a windows tablet. It will help me alot at work as long as it has a stylus and i already have alot of money invested in the windows eco system. my steam account alone has more money spent in it than the purchase price an ipad and while Crysis 2 and dragon age 1 wont play well on a bobcat tablet or Llano tablet later this year , Kotor 1 and half life 2 will run well along with dozens of games i've purchased on steam through the years.

They might run well, but are you planning to carry a keyboard and mouse along? I appreciate the value of an open platform, but I personally don't want to run software designed for a completely different interface on a tablet.

I was wrong on the less useful...I misspoke. I do feel that it seems to me that the best way to take advantage of a TBDR would be to dedicate all of its resources to Rasterization, HSR (z and stencil testing), and pixel shading (lots of ALU's and TMU's available to it).

Vertex data and modifications of it (deformation, skinning, tessellation, etc...) belong as close to the physics+animation side of things as possible IMHO and thus, if you have something like CELL nearby, on the CPU.

Well, there's nothing that prevents you from doing just that and using a simple pass-through vertex shader. But there will usually be times where you aren't fully ALU limited on the rasterisation side, so why not use those available cycles for vertex shading?

 

[Sxotty]

When will tablet makers start using only transflective screens? If they don't then that completely fail IMO.

 

[Lazy8s]

Mark Rein said iPad 2 has more RAM than the first, if that's any kind of confirmation. Not that there could've been any real doubt.

 

[wco81]

I found the following article quite amusing: http://semiaccurate.com/2011/02/22/ipad-game-console/ The title is a tad misleading, but there are quite a few good points in that one.

I don't think they're giving up anything as far as margins. Probably higher margins on iPad2 than the Xoom enjoys at a higher price.

An analyst claimed before the iPad2 announcement that Apple may have a 7.5 to 9.75% cost advantage over other manufacturers because they're able to secure components on a much larger scale than any other single manufacturer:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-ipad-price-advantage-the-breakdown-2011-03-02

I think the more interesting way that iPad and other tablets become like consoles is if they are able to render games in 1080p and output via HDMI to HDTVs.

Sure you still have the touch screen controls problem but if people start hooking these things up regularly to their HDTVs, someone is going to get the idea to allow game controllers to pair by Bluetooth to actually control games.

That or eventually, tablets will get screens to display 1080p.

While consoles and handhelds remain stagnant in capabilities for years, mobile devices are going to improve every year (or more frequently).

They won't have the power of consoles but if they put out sharp 1080p graphics, tablets could start to take business away from home consoles, the way smart phones has intruded on the handheld market.

 

[Mike11]

I don't think they're giving up anything as far as margins. Probably higher margins on iPad2 than the Xoom enjoys at a higher price.

An analyst claimed before the iPad2 announcement that Apple may have a 7.5 to 9.75% cost advantage over other manufacturers because they're able to secure components on a much larger scale than any other single manufacturer:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-ipad-price-advantage-the-breakdown-2011-03-02

I think the more interesting way that iPad and other tablets become like consoles is if they are able to render games in 1080p and output via HDMI to HDTVs.

Sure you still have the touch screen controls problem but if people start hooking these things up regularly to their HDTVs, someone is going to get the idea to allow game controllers to pair by Bluetooth to actually control games.

That or eventually, tablets will get screens to display 1080p.

While consoles and handhelds remain stagnant in capabilities for years, mobile devices are going to improve every year (or more frequently).

They won't have the power of consoles but if they put out sharp 1080p graphics, tablets could start to take business away from home consoles, the way smart phones has intruded on the handheld market.

How do you think an AppleTV2 with A5 (maybe 30% higher clocked for 720p compared to the 1024x768 on the iPad 2) might compare to a Nintendo Wii? Apple could just bring the App Store to the AppleTV2 and introduce a reference Bluetooth input device/controller (3rd parties would be responsible for more specialized "hardcore" gaming controllers) . Add universal apps across all iOS plattforms (iPhone/iPad/AppleTV) and save games synced via GameCenter and you have a quite attractive gaming console/extender, at least for the casual user.