Up until now, a shroud of mystery has surrounded Apple's
custom engineered A4 system-on-chip; we know it's clocked at 1GHz, likely tied to Apple's prior
acquisition of P.A. Semi and manufactured by Samsung. Outside of that, the only other knowledge we've gained has come not from the mouth of Cupertino, but from the
extracting wizards over at
iFixit. The A4 contains at least three layers of circuitry layered on top of each other, though it's packaged just like the iPhone processor: microprocessor in one package and two memory modules in the other package. We also learned that the iPad RAM is actually
inside of the A4 processor package, and we're expecting to learn even more from those folks in the coming days. All that said, there's still much debate on whether Apple's own silicon can stand up to Qualcomm's heralded 1GHz
Snapdragon, the chip powering Google's Nexus One among other things.
AnandTech pitted their iPad against the iPhone 3GS (600MHz ARM Cortex A8) and the aforesaid Nexus One (1GHz Snapdragon QSD8250), using a number of website loads as the primary benchmark. Overall, the A4 proved to be around 10 to 30 percent faster, though it's impossible to say what effect the operating system has on things. Have a gander at that source link for more -- we get the feeling the competitions have just begun.
posted April 4th 2010 1:57AM
@jaffreywali - what is it with you Apple lovers? Brushing aside valid comments simply because they don't fit your simplistic views?
Anything to promote Apple as the be-all-and-end-all eh? Can guarantee if Google release a tablet, it'll get two articles and wont hear from it again.
Is anyone else getting tired of engadgets "comparisons" which are based on totally irrelevant information... WOW! apple wins when you look at everything when you look through engadget colored glasses!! I'm going back to cnet for my gadget information...
@matty1124 Bye.
This is pointless. You can't get a true indication of how fast a processor is if you aren't comparing them under the same conditions. It may give a good indication as to which device is faster overall, but does little to tell us which processor is truly faster. Another piece of "fluff" from engadget... what happened to this site? It used to be good.
Sorry, but the iPad which was developed to be the "best internet experience device" ever needs almost 15(!) seconds to render engadget or gizmodo over wi-fi?!
Are you kidding us?
Even every heavy Win Vista running netbook wouldn't need more than 5 secs and most do it in probably less than 2 secs.
Apple, WTF?
@ArticiaS
Are you kidding us? Those sites don't take anywhere near that long to load on ipad. The biggest slow down loading engadget's site on any device is how badly the ad servers lag behind...That being said, it still takes nowhere near that long to load on my ipad. But go ahead and keep quoting idiot posters who are just reposting other's comments and haven't even used an ipad, you will surely look smarter for it.
@TWiz
The numbers are from the anandtech speed test benchmark. And they did load the full sites and several times.
Load www.engadget.com 13.8 seconds
Load www.gizmodo.com 14.1 seconds
So the iPad is damn slow for real internet surfing. Mobile sites ok, real internet not.
@ArticiaS Actually engadget loads enough of the site to view most articles in about 5 seconds on my iPad. All the extra crap and ads around it take longer. The iPad is 10 times faster than my net book which will be going in the trash.
@jsbaugh
Great, but its still slow.
Go ahead, slice it open, dissect the A4 and run all the benchmarking and comparison tests you want.
But isn't the real yardstick how it performs the tasks its built to do?
You may find that the Snapdragon has more of this, or more of that, but does it matter, really? People who own the iPad all report that it's FAST and responsive and power efficient. How Apple has acchieved that kind of performance is less relevant, isn't it?
They should have used a HD2. Over WiFi my shit loads much faster than that (with cache cleared).
I love how many idiots here think they have more tech knowledge than Anand Shimpi
Yeah right, One application at the time (boring)
http://www.tipb.com/2010/04/03/ipad-tear-benchmarks-battery-a4-chipset-ram-exposed/
What?256MB of Ram? That sucks!!!!!!
Blah blah... Have fun with your iPod touch XL
@jakobo Stop hating, you be happier for it.
i guess we have to hope that opera gets a broswer for iphone/ipad then we can use the same code base style browser.
Hey guys. I've used Android and it's pretty shitty. I like that you'll use a worse product to spite Apple. If you prefer Android then you have poor taste. And enjoy your cramped netbooks that don't have a single application actually made for them. Your millions of pc applications get a bit bare when you remove all the games it can't run, all the graphics software that us garbage and tiny keyboards that make word processing even worse than a touch screen. Lol. Lame.
@MisterK - oh look, a smug Apple user who feels superior because he spent money on some product and feels like his opinion is the be-all-end-all to every discussion.
Must be the first spotting of your kind on the internet.
@MisterK I use Android for reasons other than spiting Apple. I like to have an OS that is capable of doing more than one thing at a time. I like being able to customize and install whatever software I like. I like not being told what I can do with my phone by some company in California.
I've used the iPhone OS so I know what it can't do. I prefer Android because of what it can do.
@HighestRanked2
You sir, make me laugh out loud every time I read one of your comments. Unless there is a serious medical condition (other than being utterly stupid) for this you should get an award for that.
I love myself some Apple, sport a MacBook Pro, Ipod touch and a Cinema Display. I am not a hater. I just can not keep myself from pointing out to you how incredibly underpowered the pink CPU in your head is.
I don't know a lot about chips etc but is this really fair? I mean apples chip was built specificly for the ipad and for its functions, the snapdragon is a mass marketed chip for anyone who want to build something for it. This just seems a little biased to me.
Anand should compare apples to apples.. Like compare tablets to tablets... iPad to other tablets available in the market. As far as I know, the iPad doesnot compete with phones! And in his bench mark nexus beat iPhone in all th ecategories!
Wow iPeed fanboy media manipulates stuff like this!
Interesting, I didn't know the processor was manufactured by Samsung. I wonder if it's related to (or IS for that matter) the processor in the Samsung Galaxy S? I played with the Galaxy S at CTIA and it is smoking fast. I asked the Samsung dude if it was running Snapdragon (I was ignorant of this particular model at the time). He wouldn't give me much info on the processor other than "it's 1Ghz and manufactured by Samsung"...
So, basically what we see here is that the Nexus One is way FASTER than the iPhone 3GS. Also, when the Nexus One (a phone) is compared to the iPad (new category/mobile computing) it gives the iPad a run for it's money...
@HighestRanked2
Read my post, then read it again kid. I recognize that the iPad is 10 to 30% faster than the Nexus one.
What I said was that the Nexus One is FASTER than the iPhone 3GS. Did you get that this time kid... You must be one of those Apple LOVERS... Get out of here kid. Go watch paint dry...
@fulano83 Lol! That guys an iTard, and this this hole iPad saga is reaching religious proportions for some of them! Hahahaha! This is better that cable!lolololol!
The iPad should be put to test against netbooks, and against expensive netbooks, since it costs ranges from 500 to 830, man you can buy an Alienware M11x for that price... (but yes, it's a lot bulkier and ugly, I agree).
The point is: The iPad has 256 RAM, an A4 SOC, which is basely an old Cortex A8 with the same GPU found on the iPod Touch 3G, a good ISP 1024 x 768 screen and 16 GB (SSD).
Let's look for a $500 netbook shall we: Dell Mini 10 for $489 has an Atom at 1.3 Ghz, Windows 7, 160 GB of hard drive, a webcam (LOL) a real HD screen (1366x768) and 1 GB of RAM (x4 more).
The productivity and the things possible on a netbook are far more than those of the iPad, not to mention that you can browse the internet, listen to pandora and your favorite IM open at the same time. In this precise instant, I'm listening to Spotify, while uTorrent downloads, at the same time I'm writing this, I'm on my desktop PC, but it doesn't matter, the point remains, a netbook can do what I'm doing right know too.
@HighestRanked2 "Basically what we see is that Apple's A4 SoC is so fine-tuned and specifically engineered to the iPad that it pulls way ahead of the standard off-the-shelf Snapdragon."
Way to talk crap my friend. Where did you get this from? From a browser test? According to your logic my Quad Core auto performs itself, wait, what? Yeah, you know, when I use Internet Explorer 8 and then I compare it with Google Chrome, everything is renderer faster on the later, so, according to your logic, my Quad Core outperforms my own quad core by around 66%, way to do math.
If the ipad fit in my pocket, this would be an interesting compairison. But now I'm left wanting my cache refunded.
Could you have picked a more stupid and inaccurate way to test the performance of a mobile CPU then that? You have the software behind the operating system to worry about, the software behind the browser, whatever's stored on the internal or external storage, whatever other processes are running in the background, all the other hardware that's connected to the processor, and the natural, random inconsistencies of wireless radio waves over a period of time.
Wow. This is a fucking joke. Really. I'm not doubting the A4 chip is more powerful then a Snapdragon, but this test if a fucking joke. I'm disappointed Engadget is even giving the spotlight to this excuse for a "news article".
@Toshi
..and look, ipad vs ipad ..as suspected, the one on the left is faster than the one on the right.
@nitussi
i meant as expected..
At Javascript my $400 netbook outperforms the ipad by a factor of five. And it outperforms it by a factor of infinity at flash.
Flight with SnapDragon not so meaningful as
Qualcomm CPU is very slow I found.
More interesting is
A4 vs Tegra2
What difference does it make what processor the Nexus One uses. The Nexus One is yesterday's smartphone. Google isn't going to be able to sell many more of them because there are much better Android phones on the way. In fact, every month there'll be a better Android smartphone for sale. Forget the Nexus One. It's as good as a dead device. Time to move on.
Last year just over 1 million "tablet" PC's sold, Apple took over 60% of the market IN ONE DAY!
Now that's fast.
Also in ONE DAY there are now MORE iPads than there are Nexii?