[HTC One X] hamdir:
those who haven't checked Anandtechs' review of the iPad3 i suggest you do, its full of juicy information

having settled all this info in my mind, it's quit easy to draw a clear picture

the Tegra3 is a chip-set that jumped most competitors with such an early entry to quad mobile CPUs, the only other quad in the market is the PS Vita's SOC (Sony CXD5315 build by Toshiba), both quad A9, early worries about memory bandwith/L2 cache are unfounded simply because ARM A9's memory controller can't keep up with more

Snapdragon 4 introduced dual memory channel, major optimization and performance per core, however its advantage is offset by the lack of cores, its a good design for quad but right now its excellent cores will still be stalled by multi-tasking and it's amazing memory bandwidth will go to waste

Right now Tegra3 is still the best Mobile CPU you can have, better than the A5x and dual S4, however the major let down of the Tegra 3 is it's GPU

Nvidia claimed 12 cores GPU on the T3 but that's simply the number of SIMDs and not physical cores, ARM also names its SIMDs as core, but this only confuses customers, Nvidia will use this naming scheme to counter Apple claims, like Asus already responded on twitter

ARM SGX543 MP series has physical core scaling, but its only 8 SIMDs per Core, vs 12 on the Tegra 3, 8 on Adreno225 and 5 on Mali-400, the A5 has 2 cores and hence 16 SIMDs while the A5x has 4 cores and hence 32 SIMDs

In reality the Tegra3 GPU falls a little short of the iPad 2 GPU, while it beats Mali-400 and Adreno225 in most situations but not all areas, Nvidia extracted all they can from this GPU by some aggressive drivers optimization and hacks, this is how they achieved their 3x Tegra2 claim i.e: its already optimized don't expect much room here

Nvidia's GPU is really disappointing but not a disaster, it just doesn't hold a lot of overhead, right now its still the fastest GPU for android and has the quad to back it up once an app is T3 optimized, the quads can add console quality gameplay additions like ragdoll, physics and particles but might not improve FPS (this will require an engine written from grounds up for multi core and i doubt devs will be inclined)

The iPad3 GPU is massively powerful, a testament to the PS Vita's GPU, however unlike the Vita its power is wasted on those pixels and hence games will benefit from it but not the 2x jump from current iPad2/iPhone4s games, like infinity blade 2 shows, it only managed a 1.4x resolution increase without loosing frame rate, so yes most 3D games on the iPad3 will not be retina boosted, why do i keep bringing up iPad? because iOS is still the leader when it comes to mobile gaming and most games we get on Android are ports, the future of iOS games will draw the future of Android games

All this makes me conclude the following

Android's main appeal is still the OS, what you can do with it and multi tasking, which translates into the main appeal for Tegra3, its ridiculous to even think quad cores can not benefit such a heavily multi-threaded OS

Android is still not the best platform for gaming but wether we like it or not, it's best grounds for gaming is Tegrazone simply because we have Nvidia pushing/bribing developers in this direction

If you are buying an Android device right now the best you can do is Nvidia Tegra3 but damn you Nvidia for not being more generous :mad:

its been the case for ages, asymmetry between CPU and GPU power, xbox360 had a more power GPU against its CPU, PS3 had the CPU against its GPU, Apple A5x has its GPU against last year CPU, the only SOC that satisfies both angles is PS Vita with its quad CPU and quad GPU but that's because Sony has to worry about the product life cycle which is over 4 years

so you can see Tegra3 has the CPU against its GPU, its not really breaking the norms in here, its business as usual