iPad 2

So you charge without a cable?

A lot of power supplies which come with mobile devices now terminate with a USB port BTW. The power supplies may be rated at 2 amps instead of the typical 1 for smaller devices but it is a USB port.

EU has gotten a lot of phone makers to support USB cables, to do away with all the different types of power plugs and cables.

 

What kind of transfer rate are you getting though, compared to tethered?

I played around with Air Video and Zumocast on the iPad 1 and there is an option to save files on the iPad via Wifi. So what it does is transcodes on the host computer and streams it by Wifi and stores it on the iPad.

I did a bunch of them at once but it took hours and hours. I'd estimate it took even longer than watching the movies would have taken.

Of course if you're just syncing it should be faster because you're not transcoding at the same time. But I don't even think USB2 is fast enough for transferring a lot of video content.

 

Isn't this what Microsoft already does with the Zune Pass? You can stream any of the songs/ablums/playlist in the Marketplace directly to your Windows Phone 7 device http://www.zune.net/en-US/support/zunepass/features/streamingzunepass.htm

Windows Phone 7 phones also automatiaclly sync with the PC (via WiFi) when being charged ith the charger.

 

I think the difference is that you'll only get streaming access to the music you've purchased, rather than the entire music catalogue. Off topic a bit, but I'd pay $99 a year to stream anything they have, subscription style.

 

The zune pass gives you complete streaming access to the entire zune catalog for $15/month. That $15 also includes 10 downloads per month. (The downloaded songs are yours forever.) So, if you would otherwise purchase 10 songs per month it's like getting the streaming catalog for $5/month.

 

[OT]It's interesting to see that Netflix only asks $8 for unlimited movie streaming but music, with orders of magnitude less BW requirements and product investment, is $15.[/OT]

 

Right. So apples to oranges.
For $1 per song and $5 for stream you get music (MS) and for $8 for stream you get movies (NF).
Why are we comparing these again?

 

I was noticing that while some Tegra 2 tablets can boast similar battery life in general use to iPad and iPad 2, they all still fall noticeably short in battery life for video playback.

... VXD apparently showing one of its competitive advantages?

 

Or perhaps poor usage of the T2 video IP from the app/OS, hard to say.

 

iOS 5 SDK apparently has references to the double resolution which had been speculated about.

So if there is such a display no later than next April or so, how much of a jump in graphics could be expected to drive the higher resolutions?

 

Apple's SoC development wisely tracks IMG's roadmap for PowerVR cores, so the A6 will be the incremental upgrade, using the same core but upping the implementation: clock rate, bandwidth, etc. Conceivably, using the same 543MP core, they could up the implementation by even slotting in extra cores this time -- a 543MP4, for example.

Adding more cores could only be done practically under a sub-45nm process, of course.

The graphics jump from the original iPhone's A1 SoC to the iPod touch 2nd generation's A2 was basically a GPU clock speed bump from like 103 MHz to 133 MHz, but the jump to the 3GS's A3 SoC and its ISA change of ARMv6 to ARMv7 and MBX to SGX changeover was just massive.

Pulled from Heinrich4's xda-developers forum link in the A9600 thread, this video is amusing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYkEUOA6Spo

Between the Boxxee Box incident and things like that, Tegra 2's video solution has taken its knocks this time around.

That's another impressive result from Galaxy S2 along with the Mali benchmarks, although it's a half-generation newer than Tegra 2 of course.

 

Possibly none.
When going from the iPhone3GS to iPhone4 and iPad1, Apple accepted almost a factor of 4 drop in per pixel capabilities. However, I'd hope that if it takes to next April, they may have a SoC ready on the 32/28nm node that allows them to both extend the pixel pushing capabilities of the core and hopefully a memory subsystem that increases bandwidth by a factor of two. If so, it's anybodies guess just what that SoC will be. In fact, I'm sure such guesswork will be popular around here. I'm honing my armchair expertise as we speak.

 

Flash doesn't have hardware accelerated video decoding on Tegra 2 yet. The link is showing playback through a flash plugin in a browser. On my LG flash chokes on anything higher than 480p, but high def playback through youtube app or media player (for Vimeo) is fine

Cheers

 

Well, yeah, I'm not sure but wasn't the 3GS at 150MHz and the iPad 1 at 250MHz, along with twice as much bandwidth? So 5x the resolution and a 3x drop in per pixel performance. Arguably a bit less than 3x since it's unified (and 535 is very ALU-poor so VS has a larger impact I'd argue). Hopefully we won't see that big a drop again, but I fear 2x for a 4x resolution increase is very likely.

A5 is already 64-bit LPDDR2, the only way to double the bandwidth is to use 64-bit DDR3 (ala OMAP5 for tablets) or 128-bit LPDDR2 (crazy talk). I think it's most likely they'll stick to 64-bit LPDDR2. Thankfully, I don't think the A5 is very bandwidth limited. Heck, Tegra 2 & 3 are getting away with 32-bit DDR2 & DDR3 respectively! Those are clearly bandwidth limited when using the GPU at full throttle and the CPU at the same time, but Apple should be fine.

After that, they can switch to LPDDR3, and then maybe DDR4 on the tablet side of things. SPMT and Wide-IO are interesting, and Apple has the volume to make it happen earlier than other companies if they want to, but I wouldn't count on Wide-IO for at least a few generations. SPMT would be a nice incremental improvement but I don't think it's extremely likely.

 

I would expect ARM Cortex-A15 and PowerVR series 6 at 32nm.

Although a possibility would be for Apple to match the SGX543MP4 found in the Sony NGP but why aim that low? Especially if you are planning on quadrupling the pixel count and Retina Display sweetness.

 

Because Cortex A15 and Rogue implementations won't be ready for launch by early 2012.