Earlier this week, Apple announced its latest iPad. While the improvements seem to be largely incremental, I can’t wait to get my hands on one. (As an aside, I wonder how much work and how many arguments it took to come up with the name “new iPad.” I thought Apple had finally gotten over their longstanding fear of the number 3 with the iPhone 3, but I guess not.)
One of the incremental improvements that caught my eye, especially in light of trying to test the performance of touch devices, is the new iPad’s processor, the A5X. It’s hard to get a straight story as most reports refer to the chip as a quad-core processor and Apple referred to quad-core graphics. As best I can ferret out amidst the hype, the A5X is a quad-core for graphics, but for other operations it functions only as a dual-core.
Regardless of the specifics of the chip, it does have multiple cores for general execution and for graphics. Multiple processing units is an important trend over the last decade for processors in devices from PCs to tablets to phones. The interesting question to me is what is the proper way to benchmark devices in light of that trend. The problem is that for some things, the extra cores don’t help. For others, two cores may be twice as fast as one core. Similarly, additional dedicated processing units (such as for graphics) help only for particular operations.
The right answer to me is to do as we are trying to do with both HDXPRT and TouchXPRT—start with what people really do. That means that some usage scenarios and applications will benefit from additional processing units, while others will not. That should correspond with what people really experience. To make the results more useful, it would be helpful to try and understand which operations are most affected by additional general or special purpose processing units.
How do you think we should look at devices with multiple and varied processing units? I’d love to get your feedback and incorporate it into both HDXPRT and TouchXPRT over the coming months.
Bill
