The new MediaTek win shows acknowledgement that performance efficiency is still expected to be a differentiating factor in upcoming mobile products. GPU compute is finally coming into its own on mobile where it's enabling the device to understand what its actually seeing in a photo, intelligently manipulate the composition and effects based on that, and show the user a real-time preview when capturing and editing, as well as improving computer vision and even speech recognition for a variety of other intelligence and security related functionalities.
As for the A10's GPU, Apple had made previous generational performance gains without utilizing much of the low hanging fruit of ramping clock speed. Seeing as the CPU got most of its gain from that this time around, the A10 GPU is perhaps a higher clocked variant of or customized GT7600 or GT7600+. However, something to consider is, in addition to the claim of a 50% performance improvement, Apple also claimed 2/3rds the power consumption. On a similar manufacturing node, that could be possible with process optimizations and improvements to physical implementation, yet it would require an impressive effort in those areas in their own right.
As for the A10's GPU, Apple had made previous generational performance gains without utilizing much of the low hanging fruit of ramping clock speed. Seeing as the CPU got most of its gain from that this time around, the A10 GPU is perhaps a higher clocked variant of or customized GT7600 or GT7600+. However, something to consider is, in addition to the claim of a 50% performance improvement, Apple also claimed 2/3rds the power consumption. On a similar manufacturing node, that could be possible with process optimizations and improvements to physical implementation, yet it would require an impressive effort in those areas in their own right.
