Yeah I know, though it's interesting to see how one of the newest and greatest Atom CPU's for tablets looks like when put up against Apple's A8x, HP's EliteBook 1000, which is actually a very nice tablet contains an Atom Z3795, in Geek Bench it <span style="line-height:1.4em;">scored a 975 for single-core and 3167 for multi-core. The thing is the HP is no slouch either, it hums along just fine with almost zero lag. This really just shows you that Apple could start using their ARM chips in notebooks now. I would be defiantly be the first one in line for a MacBook Air with an A8x, maybe clocked too</span>
<span style="line-height:1.4em;">2Ghz, 8GB RAM but I would also take 4GB and of course a 1080P display. Probably get 14 hours of battery like the Acer ChromeBook that uses the Nvidia K1, where do I sign. </span>
It's tough to ramp a wide chip up too much. You know what happens to power draw when raising chip voltages by just a small percent. There was talk that Apple might run the A8x at 1600MHz, but they didn't go that high. So who knows what it could do in a notebook, maybe 1700MHz. Next year, I expect the numbers to move up a fair amount, depending whether they're on 16nm or 14. I also wonder if they would decide to put that fourth core in. If they nudge the CPU another 25%, which I imagine will be fairly easy for them, the core will give 2,270. Time's four would do it.
But remember that Apple uses low power i5's for their first level MacBook Air. So this still might be a bit short for OS X. It's interesting because I've been talking about this for some while. I still believe that Apple would need to put some x86 functions into the chip for emulation purposes if they use it in an Air. They can (and likely have) OS X native on RAM, as well as some apps. But major third party developers aren't going to want to do this—again. A handful of instructions would eliminate the majority of emulation slowdown. There's an awful lot of these chips that we don't know anything about, and while we can guess as to some of it, that still leaves a lot unaccounted for. This is, by far, the most complex ARM SoC out there. Three billion transistors is a very big chip, even if not in area.
Leaked benchmarks of both show that the Nexus 9 has a higher single core score than the ipad air 2. The nexus scoring in the 1900 range in 32bit mode and over 2000 in 64bit mode. The ipad air 2 does score higher in multi core score due to aving 3 cores vs 2 of the Nexus.
Sorry but why are you comparing previous generation hardware to current hardware, oh right thats the only way Apple products will gain any advantage. Try a fair comparison next time. YOU FAIL.
I'm not sure what's funnier.. Having another "Crapple" iPad mop the floor AGAIN with the Android trash, or the bed-wetting Fandroids that will come out from their mommy's basements and whine about how these numbers MUST be wrong...
Wrong numbers, more like wrong hardware, I truly do love how Apple will compare their new hardware to another vendors 6 month - 1 yr old hardware just to claim their hardware is better. Sad, very sad Apple.
what are you talking about? The nexus 9 scores over 1900 in single core, thats in 32bit mode from what I've read. It scores around 2100 single core in 64bit mode. How is a 1st gen ipad air on par? A ipad air 2 isn't on par, not single core. The ipad air2 has a third cpu core so yeah it scores more multi core. In the current state of mobile apps, what more important though, single or multi core performance? Especially considering both tablets score high in both areas.
The Nexus 9 scores 1903 single core, in 32bit mode. Geekbench founder, john pool expects it to do 2100 single core in 64bit mode aarch64. Im sure multi core score will also rise. The ipad may have one more core but the nexus clearly has the per core performance advantage.
The Nexus 9 benchmarks look quite promising for an Android tablet (Geekbench 1812 single thread / 3166 multithread):
Some thoughts:
The 64-bit Tegra K1 SOC features a two core CPU clocked at up to 2.5GHz, combined with a Kepler-based 192-core GPU. The CPU uses a seven-way superscalar microarchitecture, promising up to seven concurrent micro-ops per clock, with a 128KB four-way L1 instruction cache, a 64KB four-way L1 data cache, and a 2MB 16-way L2 cache shared between the cores. This was originally designed for server machines and repurposed for tablet. Interesting there do not appear to be any immediate plans to release a version with more than two CPU cores.
The A8X is getting nearly identical single threaded performance at only 1.5GHz. Earlier ARM SOCs for Android have had relatively poor single threaded performance. Software optimized for iOS would then be bottlenecked under Android. The new Denver Tegras promise to greatly improve the situation. I still see Android as being behind iOS in developer focus, the but apparent performance gap for users will be nearly eliminated.
Hope to get my iPad Air 2 later today. Looks like a terrific device. As for the Denver machines, I'm glad to see competition as it pushes Apple harder. I can only imagine what the iPad Air 3 benchmarks will be!
actually thats 1903 single core in 32bit mode for the nexus. Probably over 2000 single core in 64bit mode. promising for any mobile soc period.
Apple didn't lead the mobile 32bit arm v7 generation. They only finally got a lead when they beat everyone to market with a Arm v8 based chip. The tegra k1 is just the beginning of android manufacturers bringing to market arm v8 based stuff. Just like the v7 generation, the android hardware manufacturers will fly passed apple's efforts. By end of next year it will be like old times again. Plus nvidia has historically been the worst o fthe mobile cpu manufacturers so the k1 is a great start. Qualcomm's custom designed arm v8 based stuff will probably impress as well..Considering their chips ruled last of the v7 stuff and still can compete .
Geekbench's founder John pool stated that the Nexus 9 is likely to hit 2100 single core score once its running AARCH64. The current single core score is 1903 though, not 1800.
I'm sorry but I fail to see how the A8X blows the K1 away when in single core benchmarks the A8X gets 1812 and the Nexus 9 Nvidia K1 gets 1903. I repeat:
I'm sorry but I fail to see how the A8X blows the K1 away when in single core benchmarks the A8X gets 1812 and the Nexus 9 Nvidia K1 gets 1903. I repeat:
Single core Geekbench iPad Air 2 - 1812
Single core Nexus 9 - 1903
Those are single-core benchmarks, in multi-core the iPad faired much better do to their being an extra core, 3 in the A8x vs. only 2 found in the Nvidia. However without that extra core the A8x and Nvidia Denver would have had very similiar multi-core performance as shown when the Denver is pitted up against the iPhone 6. Nvidia isn't finished either as they will also release a quad core version of the Denver in Q1, 2015, the dual core variant was just the first of many versions to come. Regardless both chips are very impressive, we have also yet to have seen the graphics performance of Nvidias new chip, something that I believe will show the Denver's real strengths.
No kidding, the fastest most powerful Macbook Pro i7 only has 1.7 billion transistors.
With new 64Bit ARM chips from AMD, Opteron, Apple, A8x, Nvidia, Denver, ARM performance is fastly becoming on par with their x86 brothern. Exciting times are upon us, unfortunately their isnt many desktop OS's that run off of ARM, with Linux and Windows 8 RT being the only real two, neither of which that has managed to grab any real attention. Though I like Windows 8 RT, I believe MS will discontinue it, they should have allowed the installation of third party desktop software. I would have loved to have installed a LAMP server and an IDE on my Nokia 2520 as well as a many other opensource software, tbough I have to say web app IDE's have gotten pretty good and running them in a full fledge desktop browser vs. a mobile like Safari is head over heals better. So Windows RT does make a pretty good web app platform, much better than Chrome OS as you can still use apps like Office offline.
Those are single-core benchmarks, in multi-core the iPad faired much better do to their being an extra core, 3 in the A8x vs. only 2 found in the Nvidia. However without that extra core the A8x and Nvidia Denver would have had very similiar multi-core performance as shown when the Denver is pitted up against the iPhone 6. Nvidia isn't finished either as they will also release a quad core version of the Denver in Q1, 2015, the dual core variant was just the first of many versions to come. Regardless both chips are very impressive, we have also yet to have seen the graphics performance of Nvidias new chip, something that I believe will show the Denver's real strengths.
I'm guessing the A8X throttles less the K1, which for games is always interesting. Or if the K1 keeps it high, it chews the battery more. That all comes from the lower clock.
The Shield is a really nice tablet, probably the best Android tablet on the market next to the Nexus 9 but I won't know the latter until I actually get mine. I ordered the Nexus 9 literally minutes after the order page went live so I'm hoping I will be one of the firsts to receive mine. I just got my iPad Air 2 today but in all honestly I'm looking forward to the Nexus 9 more. Again I have to say this or you weirdos will jump all over me, not comparing the Nexus 9 to the iPad Air 2, not calling one better that the other, I'm just excited about tinkering with it, especially with those CUDA cores, hello rendering and encoding. There is just so much potential with this tablet that it's a little overwhelming. I will defiantly first install the Nvidia development OS on it, which is basically Ubuntu 14.04 but with a whole lot of GPU computing goodies. I bought the keyboard case and a special mouse for it, the Mad Catz M.O.U.S. bluetooth, I always wanted one and this gave me the perfect opportunity to get it. Though I will defiantly keep Android 5 on it I will be using Linux the most, almost as a mini desktop computer.
An iPhone/credit card is considerably easier to whip out and pay with.
Guess Square/Paypal will still have a future then.
Though IMO the iPad never had the iPhone Passport feature which was a prelude into this, nor any possibility of making phone calls on the device, so either it was intentionally left out, or the NFC is built into the radio hardware, and simply not "connected" in software.
If it's being limited to only Apple Pay, that might be to get Apple Pay in use before letting developers write software that can use the NFC for anything else. Or maybe the variety of NFC implemented can only work with business partners to the Apple Pay program to prevent them from writing their own (inherently insecure) NFC software.
Either way at this point in time it's way too early to see what happens. If Apple Pay doesn't take off, expect the NFC hardware to disappear in future models.
Guess Square/Paypal will still have a future then.
Though IMO the iPad never had the iPhone Passport feature which was a prelude into this, nor any possibility of making phone calls on the device, so either it was intentionally left out, or the NFC is built into the radio hardware, and simply not "connected" in software.
If it's being limited to only Apple Pay, that might be to get Apple Pay in use before letting developers write software that can use the NFC for anything else. Or maybe the variety of NFC implemented can only work with business partners to the Apple Pay program to prevent them from writing their own (inherently insecure) NFC software.
Either way at this point in time it's way too early to see what happens. If Apple Pay doesn't take off, expect the NFC hardware to disappear in future models.
Comments
So 70% CPU performance compared to the Macbook Air.
A GPU comparison would be interesting.
Not so good for Intel in the MBA:
http://gfxbench.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=gfx30&D1=Apple+iPad+Air+2&os1=iOS&api1=gl&D2=Intel(R)+HD+Graphics+5000&cols=2
But if you opt for a MBP you can get the Iris Pro which is much faster:
http://gfxbench.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=gfx30&D1=Apple+iPad+Air+2&os1=iOS&api1=gl&D2=Intel(R)+Iris(TM)+Pro+Graphics+5200&cols=2
It's tough to ramp a wide chip up too much. You know what happens to power draw when raising chip voltages by just a small percent. There was talk that Apple might run the A8x at 1600MHz, but they didn't go that high. So who knows what it could do in a notebook, maybe 1700MHz. Next year, I expect the numbers to move up a fair amount, depending whether they're on 16nm or 14. I also wonder if they would decide to put that fourth core in. If they nudge the CPU another 25%, which I imagine will be fairly easy for them, the core will give 2,270. Time's four would do it.
But remember that Apple uses low power i5's for their first level MacBook Air. So this still might be a bit short for OS X. It's interesting because I've been talking about this for some while. I still believe that Apple would need to put some x86 functions into the chip for emulation purposes if they use it in an Air. They can (and likely have) OS X native on RAM, as well as some apps. But major third party developers aren't going to want to do this—again. A handful of instructions would eliminate the majority of emulation slowdown. There's an awful lot of these chips that we don't know anything about, and while we can guess as to some of it, that still leaves a lot unaccounted for. This is, by far, the most complex ARM SoC out there. Three billion transistors is a very big chip, even if not in area.
Leaked benchmarks of both show that the Nexus 9 has a higher single core score than the ipad air 2. The nexus scoring in the 1900 range in 32bit mode and over 2000 in 64bit mode. The ipad air 2 does score higher in multi core score due to aving 3 cores vs 2 of the Nexus.
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! *deep inhale* BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
I'm not sure what's funnier.. Having another "Crapple" iPad mop the floor AGAIN with the Android trash, or the bed-wetting Fandroids that will come out from their mommy's basements and whine about how these numbers MUST be wrong...
Wrong numbers, more like wrong hardware, I truly do love how Apple will compare their new hardware to another vendors 6 month - 1 yr old hardware just to claim their hardware is better. Sad, very sad Apple.
what are you talking about? The nexus 9 scores over 1900 in single core, thats in 32bit mode from what I've read. It scores around 2100 single core in 64bit mode. How is a 1st gen ipad air on par? A ipad air 2 isn't on par, not single core. The ipad air2 has a third cpu core so yeah it scores more multi core. In the current state of mobile apps, what more important though, single or multi core performance? Especially considering both tablets score high in both areas.
The Nexus 9 scores 1903 single core, in 32bit mode. Geekbench founder, john pool expects it to do 2100 single core in 64bit mode aarch64. Im sure multi core score will also rise. The ipad may have one more core but the nexus clearly has the per core performance advantage.
The Nexus 9 benchmarks look quite promising for an Android tablet (Geekbench 1812 single thread / 3166 multithread):
Some thoughts:
The 64-bit Tegra K1 SOC features a two core CPU clocked at up to 2.5GHz, combined with a Kepler-based 192-core GPU. The CPU uses a seven-way superscalar microarchitecture, promising up to seven concurrent micro-ops per clock, with a 128KB four-way L1 instruction cache, a 64KB four-way L1 data cache, and a 2MB 16-way L2 cache shared between the cores. This was originally designed for server machines and repurposed for tablet. Interesting there do not appear to be any immediate plans to release a version with more than two CPU cores.
The A8X is getting nearly identical single threaded performance at only 1.5GHz. Earlier ARM SOCs for Android have had relatively poor single threaded performance. Software optimized for iOS would then be bottlenecked under Android. The new Denver Tegras promise to greatly improve the situation. I still see Android as being behind iOS in developer focus, the but apparent performance gap for users will be nearly eliminated.
Hope to get my iPad Air 2 later today. Looks like a terrific device. As for the Denver machines, I'm glad to see competition as it pushes Apple harder. I can only imagine what the iPad Air 3 benchmarks will be!
actually thats 1903 single core in 32bit mode for the nexus. Probably over 2000 single core in 64bit mode. promising for any mobile soc period.
Apple didn't lead the mobile 32bit arm v7 generation. They only finally got a lead when they beat everyone to market with a Arm v8 based chip. The tegra k1 is just the beginning of android manufacturers bringing to market arm v8 based stuff. Just like the v7 generation, the android hardware manufacturers will fly passed apple's efforts. By end of next year it will be like old times again. Plus nvidia has historically been the worst o fthe mobile cpu manufacturers so the k1 is a great start. Qualcomm's custom designed arm v8 based stuff will probably impress as well..Considering their chips ruled last of the v7 stuff and still can compete .
Geekbench's founder John pool stated that the Nexus 9 is likely to hit 2100 single core score once its running AARCH64. The current single core score is 1903 though, not 1800.
No kidding, the fastest most powerful Macbook Pro i7 only has 1.7 billion transistors.
I'm sorry but I fail to see how the A8X blows the K1 away when in single core benchmarks the A8X gets 1812 and the Nexus 9 Nvidia K1 gets 1903. I repeat:
Single core Geekbench iPad Air 2 - 1812
Single core Nexus 9 - 1903
The Nexus 9 is faster than the iPad Air 2.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/22/googles-nexus-9-tablet-is-a-huge-win-for-nvidia.aspx
A8x is only better in Geekbench 3.0(due to extra core) though -- still worst/significantly worst in other tests.
Those are single-core benchmarks, in multi-core the iPad faired much better do to their being an extra core, 3 in the A8x vs. only 2 found in the Nvidia. However without that extra core the A8x and Nvidia Denver would have had very similiar multi-core performance as shown when the Denver is pitted up against the iPhone 6. Nvidia isn't finished either as they will also release a quad core version of the Denver in Q1, 2015, the dual core variant was just the first of many versions to come. Regardless both chips are very impressive, we have also yet to have seen the graphics performance of Nvidias new chip, something that I believe will show the Denver's real strengths.
With new 64Bit ARM chips from AMD, Opteron, Apple, A8x, Nvidia, Denver, ARM performance is fastly becoming on par with their x86 brothern. Exciting times are upon us, unfortunately their isnt many desktop OS's that run off of ARM, with Linux and Windows 8 RT being the only real two, neither of which that has managed to grab any real attention. Though I like Windows 8 RT, I believe MS will discontinue it, they should have allowed the installation of third party desktop software. I would have loved to have installed a LAMP server and an IDE on my Nokia 2520 as well as a many other opensource software, tbough I have to say web app IDE's have gotten pretty good and running them in a full fledge desktop browser vs. a mobile like Safari is head over heals better. So Windows RT does make a pretty good web app platform, much better than Chrome OS as you can still use apps like Office offline.
So 70% CPU performance compared to the Macbook Air.
A GPU comparison would be interesting.
Here are GPU charts pro iPad Air 2 a Nvidia Shield Tablet:
http://gfxbench.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=gfx30&D1=Apple+iPad+Air+2&os1=iOS&api1=gl&D2=NVIDIA+Shield+tablet&cols=2
Each excels in some tests.
And here few benchmarks of Nexus 9. Not bad.
http://gfxbench.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=gfx30&D1=Apple+iPad+Air+2&os1=iOS&api1=gl&D2=Google+Nexus+9&cols=2
Those are single-core benchmarks, in multi-core the iPad faired much better do to their being an extra core, 3 in the A8x vs. only 2 found in the Nvidia. However without that extra core the A8x and Nvidia Denver would have had very similiar multi-core performance as shown when the Denver is pitted up against the iPhone 6. Nvidia isn't finished either as they will also release a quad core version of the Denver in Q1, 2015, the dual core variant was just the first of many versions to come. Regardless both chips are very impressive, we have also yet to have seen the graphics performance of Nvidias new chip, something that I believe will show the Denver's real strengths.
I'm guessing the A8X throttles less the K1, which for games is always interesting. Or if the K1 keeps it high, it chews the battery more. That all comes from the lower clock.
Here are GPU charts pro iPad Air 2 a Nvidia Shield Tablet:
http://gfxbench.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=gfx30&D1=Apple+iPad+Air+2&os1=iOS&api1=gl&D2=NVIDIA+Shield+tablet&cols=2
Each excels in some tests.
And here few benchmarks of Nexus 9. Not bad.
http://gfxbench.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=gfx30&D1=Apple+iPad+Air+2&os1=iOS&api1=gl&D2=Google+Nexus+9&cols=2
The Shield is a really nice tablet, probably the best Android tablet on the market next to the Nexus 9 but I won't know the latter until I actually get mine. I ordered the Nexus 9 literally minutes after the order page went live so I'm hoping I will be one of the firsts to receive mine. I just got my iPad Air 2 today but in all honestly I'm looking forward to the Nexus 9 more. Again I have to say this or you weirdos will jump all over me, not comparing the Nexus 9 to the iPad Air 2, not calling one better that the other, I'm just excited about tinkering with it, especially with those CUDA cores, hello rendering and encoding. There is just so much potential with this tablet that it's a little overwhelming. I will defiantly first install the Nvidia development OS on it, which is basically Ubuntu 14.04 but with a whole lot of GPU computing goodies. I bought the keyboard case and a special mouse for it, the Mad Catz M.O.U.S. bluetooth, I always wanted one and this gave me the perfect opportunity to get it. Though I will defiantly keep Android 5 on it I will be using Linux the most, almost as a mini desktop computer.
Guess Square/Paypal will still have a future then.
Though IMO the iPad never had the iPhone Passport feature which was a prelude into this, nor any possibility of making phone calls on the device, so either it was intentionally left out, or the NFC is built into the radio hardware, and simply not "connected" in software.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/192729-ipad-air-2-teardown-reveals-the-magic-of-apples-thinnest-tablet-a-smaller-battery
If it's being limited to only Apple Pay, that might be to get Apple Pay in use before letting developers write software that can use the NFC for anything else. Or maybe the variety of NFC implemented can only work with business partners to the Apple Pay program to prevent them from writing their own (inherently insecure) NFC software.
Either way at this point in time it's way too early to see what happens. If Apple Pay doesn't take off, expect the NFC hardware to disappear in future models.
Time will tell, I guess.