warmi wrote:Ok .. so it is Cortex 9 + Mali-50 series GPU...
There is no way that could be true and in my opinion that original article is just completely full of guesses. I posted about it on another forum but I'll repost here.
I am highly suspicious of their ARM Mali 50 series claim for the GPU (obviously I could be wrong) because that would make it quite inferior to the iPhone 3GS.
With vertex processing ARM Mali-55 pushes 1M poly/sec wheres the SGX535 does 28M poly/sec... even the smallest SGX520 does 7M poly/sec. Comparing fillrate you see a huge gap again with 100M pix/sec for the Mali-55 and 400M pix/sec for the SGX535 (someone please correct this number if it is incorrect, I know that 400M is the floor possibility but this might possibly be 800M pix/sec in their marketing by using two pipelines with a scene depth complexity of 2.5)
Apple has a significant investment in PVR technology (both as a key investor owning 9.5% of the company and in their existing technology) so I see little reason to move away from that. Not to mention that they would lose the PVR specific extensions by moving to another technology.
If they were looking at ARM GPU technology I don't see how they could use anything less than the ARM Mali-400 dual-core which would yield theoretical 30M poly/sec, 550M pix/sec and is roughly the equivalent chip to the one in the iPhone 3GS. Since they are designing the SOC in-house why would they vendor lock to strictly ARM to get the exact same thing they already have with a 3GS?
I do not see why Apple would switch away from PVR at this point, especially since the iPad is made to run iPhone applications. As soon as you have different GPUs you not only have completely different drivers but also completely different driver bugs. If you wanted to have things run flawlessly you would expect them to be using a PVR chip.
So needless to say I'm a little sceptical here.
Of course I could be completely wrong about PVR and they switch to an unannounced ARM GPU, but why put such an investment in PVR if you are just going to move away so quickly.
joew wrote:There is no way that could be true and in my opinion that original article is just completely full of guesses. I posted about it on another forum but I'll repost here.
Yeah, after looking at what ARM Mali 55 is ... I completely agree.
On the other hand, it could be simply a typo and Apple is using something like Mali 400 - it still wouldn't make much sense given their relationship with Imagination Technologies but you never know.
PS.
The PVR angle makes it even less probably since Mali class hardware doesn't support PVR and they would have to come up with some strange GLES driver implementation to decode/recode PVRs as ETC streams.
It could be also that they are in fact using a crappy GPU because they want their mandatory 40% of charge... even if the price is lower than the iphone and the screen costs much more.
Even if this would not make any sense.
