Some of those playbook concerns seem more manufactured than anything. I'm not preordering or anything, but the speed which flash appears to load shouldn't be a problem for ipad users, just turn off flash and it'll be just as crisp as loading on your ipad. I'm also hopeful that some of these competitors will push apple.
iPad 2
- Thread starter AlphaWolf
- Start date
Some of those playbook concerns seem more manufactured than anything. I'm not preordering or anything, but the speed which flash appears to load shouldn't be a problem for ipad users, just turn off flash and it'll be just as crisp as loading on your ipad. I'm also hopeful that some of these competitors will push apple.
The xoom looks pretty fast to me
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/51517/Motorola-XOOM-Tablet-Review/
they have the zoom and the original ipad next to each other and load up websites and angry birds. The zoom is much faster at both so if you felt the ipad had an acceptable browsing and gaming performance then the xoom is a big step above it and i honestly can't see ipad 2 being muc hfaster if any faster than this thing is at websites.
It also comes with 1GB of ram which if the ipad is stuck at 512MB will help with multi tasking and having multiple pages open at once. You also get the ability to add SD cards to the tablet which i don't believe is avalible on the ipad 2 .
I'm personaly waiting for something good running a full verison of windows .
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/51517/Motorola-XOOM-Tablet-Review/
they have the zoom and the original ipad next to each other and load up websites and angry birds. The zoom is much faster at both so if you felt the ipad had an acceptable browsing and gaming performance then the xoom is a big step above it and i honestly can't see ipad 2 being muc hfaster if any faster than this thing is at websites.
It also comes with 1GB of ram which if the ipad is stuck at 512MB will help with multi tasking and having multiple pages open at once. You also get the ability to add SD cards to the tablet which i don't believe is avalible on the ipad 2 .
I'm personaly waiting for something good running a full verison of windows .
this might be up your street then (oak trail running windows 7)
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/01/fujitsu-stylistic-q550-hands-on/
Yea , i'm waiting for something a little more powerful in the gpu department , I'm hoping bravos or llano hits this year.
I wont get a tablet till sept when I turn 30 , its the gift my family is getting me . I'm hoping I'd be able to beta win 8 also with it.
I need to play TOR all the time damn it !
Engadget's coverage sucks for anything not an ipad
here is some msi fusion tablets to bad thy are 1ghz single core ones
http://fudzilla.com/notebooks/item/21978-msi-shows-its-fusion-tablet-as-well
I'm hoping they can go to 32nm before i'm ready to buy and offer a dual core or mabye a dual core llano
Last edited by a moderator:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/02/hp-touchpad-shoots-down-planes-shows-off-next-gen-snapdragons/
this looks really nice for dual core snap dragons and an andrano core
this looks really nice for dual core snap dragons and an andrano core
Yeah, it's no surprise they didn't bump the rez, with all the production woes and constraints they've suffered with the iPhone4 screen. The darn thing's still on pretty much constant back-order around here... More than eight friggin' months after launch!
iPad2... Looks great, really. Well, I don't like the beveled rear, what I loved about the iPhone4 was its monolithic block shape (*ahem* apart from the rounded corners, of course...), but I can live with it.
Other things I don't like is lack of USB connector and SD cardslot, and there's no LED light for the rear-facing camera. Bummer! They finally stuck on a light for the iPhone, and they skimp out on the iPad.
Also, the price's - to quote Steve, the living, breathing, walking, talking (still) pipe-cleaner - unbelievable. But not in an entirely positive sense. $100 for an extra 16 gigs of flash is as bad a joke this year as it was last, and still the same extra $130 for the 3G modem a year later is hella steep.
Other than that, this thing looks really great. Nvidia and others can come up with basically whatever hardware they want; quad-core, octa-core, more RAM, more MHz, whatever, and it won't matter... What will drive evolution in these (post-PC, lol! *derisive snort*) devices is the synergy between hardware, software and people - how you use them, the user interface, all of that. And Apple gets that. Say what you will about Cupertino, the usual internet Apple hate, all of that - you gotta admit they're on to something here!
Without having an overall-encompassing approach to all of these things, coupled with experience, you're not going to accomplish much here. There's ample evidence of a great amount of thought going into not just the iPad2, but also the new apps and all of that.
Apple stands to sell absolute craploads of these things from what I can tell. Tablets are starting to really come into their own, maturing by leaps and bounds in front of our very eyes. They're still luxury items for sure, you can't replace a PC/laptop with one of these things, not without going insane from frustration anyway. So they're complementary devices for upper middle-class people primarily, but that will change. But they're getting there. Fast.
This is a really neat gadget. Whatever complaints I may have, they're minor really. 10 hours battery life with this performance, assuming Steve doesn't lie. That's fabulous. You absolutely need that in a device like this. Another thing that Apple gets. And just look at his uber smug grinning face after having presented the "smart" cover video... Lol, that's priceless. He knows he has a winner here, and that he's about to make money hand over fist. Rightfully so I must say. This looks like a great gadget.
Now, if they could just quadruple the pixels as was rumored previously, and lighten the ridiculously locked-down nature of iOS - but that'll never happen. Oh, and Steve's little speech at the end of the presentation about family and humanities and alla that - great stuff man. But what about the poor brown chinese people screwing these things together in Foxconn's slave factories? There's that aspect too to Apple unfortunately.
ok so... it looks like the iPad 2 might only have 256MB of ram.
I really don't get how they can cripple this thing with half the memory of their phone.
I really don't get how they can cripple this thing with half the memory of their phone.
Last edited by a moderator:
I've heard multiple times that this is a stop gap Ipad . The original Ipad 2 was supposed to come out now with more ram , dual core processor and an sd slot and new screen but was delayed due to screen production issues. So we may see another ipad in time for the holidays.
Personaly I'd never buy a tablet in which i can't increase the storage space on it. an sd card slot is a must , perhaps even two is a must for me.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=21030
It has been discussed already. It's most likely just an arithmetic performance increase, but in order to get up to 9x times compared to SGX535 you need a MP2 (always per clock). Single SGX543 vs. SGX535 is per clock at 4.5x times in terms of FLOPs.
Well if they added an SD card slot that would prevent them from charging $100 for an extra 16 GB of storage, and $100 more for an additional 32 GB on top of that. With the actual cost being $20-25 for a 16 GB SD card, the pricing is looking even more ridiculous than last year when Flash prices were higher. So you can bet Apple's margins are going to be sky high. And $130 for a 3G modem? You might as well buy an Android 2.2 phone(Say LG Optimus One) for that much and use tethering instead!
We get HDMI at the very least, but that costs $39 extra (how much does the cable cost to make, $5??). And a "magical" cover for another $39 (which again costs $5 to make). Time to invest in Apple stock methinks
Coming to the SoC, it looks like Apple probably has the highest performance this time around, particularly the graphics. It was sorely needed though, given how weak the SGX 535 was for the high resolution. We should see some nice looking games.
Apple needs to pull in the release schedule for the ipod touch tho. Given the reduced complexity, there's no conceivable reason that it should launch later than the iphone!
We get HDMI at the very least, but that costs $39 extra (how much does the cable cost to make, $5??). And a "magical" cover for another $39 (which again costs $5 to make). Time to invest in Apple stock methinks
Coming to the SoC, it looks like Apple probably has the highest performance this time around, particularly the graphics. It was sorely needed though, given how weak the SGX 535 was for the high resolution. We should see some nice looking games.
Apple needs to pull in the release schedule for the ipod touch tho. Given the reduced complexity, there's no conceivable reason that it should launch later than the iphone!
As a sidenote that 9x times figure is more like a theoretical marketing number than anything else. Of course is a SGX543 MP2 a lot faster than a SGX535, but in texel/pixel fill-rate limited conditions it's only a factor 2x (assuming same frequencies) against the 535.
They obviously have a good reason to do so. In their very own iOS the GPU is anything but just a decorative special purpose unit.
Yeah but they were so nice as to print the DRAM part number directly onto the chip, which I doubt we will see on the new A5.
Yeah, TBDR powervr really is ideal for portable graphics. Tegra2 still uses plain ol' immediate mode rendering, yes?
I wonder when, or hell, even IF, AMD and Nvidia will ever wean themselves off the immediate mode teat. You'd think with the bandwidth brick wall staring them in the face these days they'd at least seriously consider it, but they never seem to get off their asses and do it.
More like never. For one it would be far too complicated for others to switch to deferred rendering architectures and from the other hand I don't see any bandwidth brick wall in sight to be honest especially if you consider how narrow bus-widths on current SoCs still are.
Think of it that way: IMG being the only IHV having a true TBDR architecture for all those years have patented whatever they could have patented so far. Of course could other IHVs find workarounds, but the entire hussle -especially given their lack of experience with DRs- doesn't sound to me at least worth the effort, since after the appearance of early-Z based IMRs there aren't any worlds of difference compared to TBDRs anymore. Of course are there still some important distinct advantages for a TBDR, but you'll have also a damn hard time to convince me that it won't have any disadvantages at all. As much as early Z can be viewed as a workaround for IMRs (always oversimplified), there should be TBDR specific workarounds for it's disadvantages.
The trick is rather to create a balanced pipeline within an architecture, irrelevant of the internal workflow. AMD hasn't even dealt yet with the embedded market and NV isn't even using any tiling but employs extensive caching mechanisms amongst others.
I'd rather say 'on low performance devices'.
I think the 'bandwidth brick wall' is getting worse for TBDR faster than for IMR.
The only way bandwidth might increase on iPad2 is due to using more polys which might result in more overdraw. But once you have enough compute power, your models start to get more and more detailed (which means it doesn't result in more overdraw due to more models, but in more detailed models->probably same overdraw). Then you'll get bandwidth bound because of all the interpolator-data you 'cache' in video memory for TBDR. Let's say you have 1Mio vertices (for simplicity reason, not that I claim games would use that on iPad2) for your frame, each
float4 position
float3 tangent
float4 bitangent
float2 UV
-> 52MB.
drawing to a 1024x768xRGBA8 means 6MB for Z+Color, so up to 9x overdraw you end up being cheaper bandwidth wise when running in forward mode.
If you really get pixel bound, a simple zpass will result in probably the same pixelshader load on forward pipelines like on TBDR piplines, due to EarlyZ optimizations.
I think time is playing for AMD/Nvidia, I'd really like to know how Imagination would handle tesselation, if NVidia would add that 'poison pill' into one of the future tegra gpus.
Does anyone have any information about the memory bandwidth the ipad might have?
I can't be the only one who thinks back at the Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 from 2001, which were based on the Kyro II which actually used PowerVR tile based rendering.