14 DAY TRIAL // Apple released the third generation iPad tablet not long ago and, during its launch event, it showed a slide where the A5X graphics were said to be four times better than NVIDIA's Tegra 3.
Apple did not follow through on its boast in the way that people would be inclined to expect after such a bold statement.
When making such a claim, companies should at least show some benchmarks, so that onlookers could at least know where those results came from.
Since Apple did no such thing, NVIDIA is understandably skeptical about the idea that the Kal-El is so far outmatched.
After all, the Santa Clara, California-based company is very proud of its 4-PLUS-1 platform.
Apple could have chosen, as NVIDIA pointed out, certain apps deliberately so that the performance results would end up fitting with its claim.
That isn't to say that the GPU maker doesn't accept that Tegra 3 could be weaker, since it basically is.
After all, even the iPad 2 managed to beat the ASUS Transformer Prime in some benchmarks, despite the former having a dual-core chip (with dual-core graphics) that is older than Tegra 3 by a year or so.
Still, from there to a fourfold advantage is a really big leap, so we can't help but feel reluctant to believe Apple yet.
“We don’t have the benchmark information,” Ken Brown, a spokesman for Nvidia, told ZDNet. “We have to understand what the application was that was used. Was it one or a variety of applications? What drivers were used? There are so many issues to get into with benchmark.”
Brown said that it was “certainly flattering” that Apple referenced the Tegra 3 during the event but that, ultimately, it didn't prove a thing.
“At some point it will become more clear what the performance really is,” said Brown. “For now, Apple has a really generic statement.”