Apple A8 and A8X

I'd like to see screenshots which show this "higher quality".

Xmas puts his finger on the heart of the matter. But this is a gaming benchmark, so not only do we want to see static screenshots which can bee zoomed in at individual pixel level (which is much too stringent), we want to see demonstrated the relevance of this at 30 or 60 fps in actual games on actual devices. And if it is, indeed, demonstrable (hah!) then we can discuss the costs involved...

How many decimals of pi do you need to make a wedding ring? 2? 5? 47? At a certain point it is simply good enough, and you optimize for other parameters.
 
A8X 2.5 times GPU perf vs A7, that should at least equal K1 in GLBenchmark, and at a lower power draw

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Source Anandtech
 
2.5x the iPad Air's GPU performance puts it almost perfectly on par with 32bit TK1, at least in the 3dmark and gfxbench offscreen tests.
 
Was it actually mentioned if the iPad Mini 3 uses the A8X?, no mention of RAM either...
 
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2.5x the iPad Air's GPU performance puts it almost perfectly on par with 32bit TK1, at least in the 3dmark and gfxbench offscreen tests.
it means that for the first time, apple is playing catch up... on a 3 billion transistor SoC made of 20nm... a really crazy piece of silicon for such performance.
and what is the chance of next gen A9 will stay competitive against Erista ? If they use GX6650 with A8X, they already maxed out GPU performance on PVR arch. When is due next img tech uarch ?
 
it means that for the first time, apple is playing catch up... on a 3 billion transistor SoC made of 20nm... a really crazy piece of silicon for such performance.
and what is the chance of next gen A9 will stay competitive against Erista ? If they use GX6650 with A8X, they already maxed out GPU performance on PVR arch. When is due next img tech uarch ?

Well they will be announcing a Series 7 by CES 2015 (and even the Series 6XT series can scale beyond 6 clusters to 8 clusters). But anyway, Apple's A series SoC's are only an indirect competitor to NVIDIA, Intel, and Qualcomm SoC's, and you will probably not see a GX6650-powered SoC running on Android for at least six months.

Considering that Apple has full control of the hardware and software stack in iPad Air 2, and considering that they have a very liberal budget for transistor count and SoC die size, it is pretty miraculous that Nexus 9 will easily keep pace with it with respect to CPU/GPU performance and feature set (and obviously mobile Kepler is a more advanced GPU in many ways, with support for DX12, OpenGL 4.4, CUDA, Unreal Engine 4, tessellation, geometry shaders, compute shaders, etc).
 
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On a more personal note - well, damn. This looks good both in terms of real world performance, battery life, and ergonomical aspects. Size and weight of course but the anti-reflective coating is also very welcome. Dual channel .11ac (866Mbps nominal), and touch id. ffs. I had promised myself to wait for at least FinFet and preferably new memory arch. And possibly a bigger screen. But this package is pretty damn compelling if you are at all into these kinds of devices.
The Nexus 9 and the iPad Air really raise the bar in their respective parts of the market.
 
They might be fab constrained on the A8 chip. With A8X spanning 3B trannies, that's a fair chunk of silicon, and the volumes Apple demand... Maybe they felt the mini was good enough as-is. It's not their flagship product anyhow.
 
They might be fab constrained on the A8 chip. With A8X spanning 3B trannies, that's a fair chunk of silicon, and the volumes Apple demand... Maybe they felt the mini was good enough as-is. It's not their flagship product anyhow.

Now they have a phablet in the 6 Plus, the role of the mini is less clear IMO.
 
So, going to GX +50%, 6 cluster 50%, then a ~10% clock boost? Seems reasonable. I wonder if they went back to an 128 bit interface for the memory.

I can hear Rys and the guys laughing maniacally in the background. :smile:

Well, Series 7 is coming sooner rather than later, no ;)
 
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