When Apple unveiled the iPhone 5 last week, the company promised that its custom A6 chip deliver performance twice as fast as its predecessor, the iPhone 4S. But according to the handset’s first benchmarks, this isn’t just the fastest iPhone yet — it’s also one of the most powerful smartphones money can buy.
Apple’s not exactly the kind of company that boasts lightly. That’s not to say they don’t boast a lot — they’re probably the most bragging of all the companies in tech, and for damn good reason — but every boast is weighted against genuine success, not numbers fudging.
So when Apple debuted the new iPad a couple weeks ago and claimed that their tablet — powered by a dual-core CPU and quad-core graphics — outperformed the quad-core CPU and 12-core graphics of the NVIDIA Tegra 3 SoC, a lot of people arched their eyebrows. NVIDIA raised a stink, saying it couldn’t possibly be true. But we quietly suspected that Apple would be proven right.
So guess which is faster in independent benchmarks?
During Apple’s iPad keynote yesterday, Phil Schiller, its senior vice president of worldwide marketing, claimed the tablet’s new A5X processor offers 4X the graphics performance of NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 chip.
NVIDIA says that while it was “certainly flattering” to be called out by the Cupertino company, it will be performing its own benchmarks on the new iPad to see if Apple’s claims are really accurate.