This is a major win for Qualcomm....this can't be underestimated.
Who's underestimating anything? It's a natural reality that the newer a product the better it usually ends up or at least should be. Qualcomm & Apple have different design cycles and just for the record's sake Qualcomm has its own customers which it's selling its SoCs too, while Apple has none. They're indirectly competing.
Shrink the A5X to 28nm hypothetically, clock its GPU at the same 400MHz as Adreno320 and do the math yourself how the picture would look like then.
If you think back to the iPhone 4s...or even every iPhone launch besides 4...apple has had the best mobile phone gpu by quite some margin....they have carried on being ultra aggressive on that front and DOUBLED the performance of last years power house...that's ridiculous in its self...but to think Qualcomm has beaten even the new a6 before its launched is bbq pretty amazing considering the resources and technical expertise apple has thrown into its SOC division.
I don't recall "every" iPhone to have the best GPU at the time
apart from iPhone4S and even then didn't it take too long before its GPU performance had been matched or exceeded by competing solutions.
Yes Adreno320 doubles GPU performance over Adreno225 but so does A6 vs. iPhone4S A5.
It actually beats the new iPad...with its quad core/quad channel memory..in a phone...awesome.
Qualcomm has undeniably excellent execution, but considering the raw specs of the 320 it's delivering
expectable performance compared to a 225 with the same frequency and probably half the unit counts. One would expect that a newer architecture would had come with some homework to increase efficiency by quite a bit or that the driver/compiler would had matured in the meantime.
Yes ailuros if you compare just alu lanes perhaps you are right...I'm not as familiar as you with regards to the other execution resources available for both gpus...but I would guess sgx mp4 has more of everything else...and also probably if process node being equal...takes up less die area.
Let's flip that coin into another direction; assuming I'm right and the 320 has "64SPs" as in desktop marketing parlance at 400MHz. I'm putting an upcoming "64SP"@400MHz Wayne ULP GeForce against it and you tell me on which you'll place your bets for which of the two would win with flying colours. And no the point here isn't neither to compare it to future products in theory nor to undermine the 320 from any perspective.
The real point here is efficiency and it shouldn't be too hard to understand and digest.
Let's not forget part of gaining g an advantage is through process nodes...and Qualcomm manages it with a relatively high clocked quad core krait, 2mb ram IN A PHONE....apples new phone chip can't touch it outside of some memory benchmarks and a blazing sunspider score...good job Qualcomm!.
Why are you so hung up on Apple's i-Gear anyway? I don't have even a single i-device nor any other high end smartphone at the moment, despite that I fool around with several of them from time to time. As I said Apple actually competes with itself and they have an insane profit margin for what they're doing.
But if it has to be a direct comparison from so far GLBenchmark2.5 results there are devices with Adreon320s that range from 2000+ up to 3400+ frames. My own guess would place the iPhone5 into the 2300-2400 frame ballpark which still would make the product highly competitive and still quite a bit above the 2.5 score of Samsung's SIII hotseller.
Will any of the above affect in its majority the public's buying decisions? I severely doubt so especially for iPhones since "i-fanatics" (if I may call them that) will buy the 5 for its own merits or if you prefer the total user experience.
