New iPad Launch
New iPad Launch - Graphics Keynote Address Credit: Apple

Earlier this month, when Apple unveiled its latest tablet - the new iPad - Chief Executive Tim Cook claimed the product (with the new A5X chip) would deliver four times the performance of quad-core Tegra 3 processor from NVIDIA.

Needless to say, the Cupertino company's rivals were not very happy and hit back, challenging Apple to prove the A5X's capabilities.

A report by AppleNewsDaily had a tech blogger from Australia, called Ritchie, take up the challenge... and put the A5X through a stern test, with a parallel CPU benchmark video comparison of the new iPad against the Tegra 3-powered ASUS Transformer Prime.

The impromptu test, which was also reported on by TUAW, only showed to prove Apple's claims true - the A5X (dual-core with quad-core graphics) clearly trounces the quad-core Tegra 3 with 12-core graphics.

"Prediction: Once NVIDIA runs A5X benchmarks and finds out it trounces the Tegra 3, we hear nothing more from them about it," noted TUAW's Chris Rawson in his post on 8 March.

Check Out Ritchie's Video...

Elsewhere, benchmarks run by Laptopmag give further insights into how the two processors stack up.

Check out brief recap of test results for each category:

GL Benchmark 2.1

The new iPad recorded a convincingly higher score in the Egypt standard test - depicting a 3D animation of ancient Egypt with a score of 6718 frames at a rate of 60 frames per second (fps), compared to the Transformer Prime's 5,939 frames at 53 fps.

The Apple device also won the Geometry test, with a score of 7,530,524 frames at a rate of 57 fps while the Tegra 3-based Transformer Prime processed just 3,523,926 frames at a rate of 27 fps.

The new iPad completed a clean sweep in this category by winning the Program's Fill test, with a score of 1.98 billion textels per second to the Prime's 404.61 million.

Geekbench

Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that measures raw processing power, rather than graphics alone. The quad-core Tegra 3 blew its rival away as it achieved an overall score of 1,571 compared to the A5X's 692. NVIDIA's offering clearly dominated across various subtests, including Integer (1391 to 614), Floating Point (2408 to 825) and Memory Subtests (1076 to 784).

The A5X, however, beat the Tegra 3 by a small margin (324 to 266) on the Stream subtest.

Browser Benchmark - Sunspider

The Tegra 3 faltered a bit in the browser benchmark tests, wherein the Prime's Tegra 3 recorded 2216 milliseconds (ms) against the new iPad's 1810ms in the Sunspider JavaScript rendering test.

Subjective Gaming Performance

There is no proper benchmark to measure gaming performance on a tablet or record frame rates like we do with FRAPs in Windows. Therefore the evaluation, by and large, is based on subjective game play experience... that is, by playing side-by-side on both devices. The evaluation is then based on special action sequence processing speeds, colour accuracy, frame lags, texture details, image rendering clarity and such.

Watch Laptopmag's video to evaluate gaming performance:

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