In case you haven’t noticed, Apple’s third generation iPad came out today. Judging by the early reviews, it’s already set the benchmark for what a tablet should be. Now when Apple announced the new iPad last week they said that their A5X chip is 4x faster than NVIDIA’s Tegra 3. That’s a bold claim, and it ruffled a few of NVIDIA’s feathers, but now that people have both the Transformer Prime and the third gen iPad in hand it’s time to run some benchmarks. The folks from Ritchie’s Room made a quick video showing off the type of numbers that they saw after running GLBenchmark, BrowserMark, and SunSpider. The results: When it comes to GLBenchmark, the iPad is anywhere from 2.3x to 3.4x faster. In BrowserMark the Transformer Prime is actually faster, scoring 100,849 points versus the iPad’s 99,561. And finally SunSpider, a benchmark where a lower number is better since it measures that amount of time it takes to complete a run. The iPad scored 1825 milliseconds, the Transformer Prime did it in 2344 milliseconds.
Now if you think any of these numbers matter, then great, we hope you like being able to brag to your friends about how much faster your toy is compared to their toy. The important thing here is software, and let’s be honest with each other … Android tablets blow. It’s not NVIDIA’s fault, it’s not Samsung’s or ASUS’s fault, it’s all Google. Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Android, doesn’t hold a candle to iOS. At least that this author’s opinion.
The future can change of course. We know Google is already hard at work on Jelly Bean and Key Lime Pie, but we don’t know any particular details about either of those future versions of Android. And hey, but the time they come out we’ll probably already see iOS 6, maybe even iOS 7.