[Asus Transformer TF700] HoushaSen:
I do see your point. I believe our difference in opinion is most likely that you are believing IO as absolute bottleneck. Whereas, I believe IO may had been a bottleneck and may even still be but it can be changed to the degree that bottleneck is shifted, which in hardware it is done all the time. Throughput is determined by the bottleneck if everything is in sequential linear operation.

For instance, nand read -> Memory -> Cache -> CPU/GPU process -> Cache -> Memory -> nand write. Before next cycle of this starts.

In above scenario, yes. no matter what you do bad nand write would not change the work flow. As every other piece be waiting for nand write to finish.

In fact, this might had been a case in a big picture when TF700 was originally released, or for Prime.

However, as you are aware hardware operation is not this simple. Just as an pure example, what if you have memory hold data twice before actually writing to nand? If nand write was assumed to had been bottleneck and in fact more than twice slower than completion of the other piece, you can actually boost the throughput by factor of 2.

The worst scenario had actually been RAM issue or Cache because those are so close to CPU i.e. right before the actual data processing, you cannot do anything. But fortunately RAM performance if Antutu score to be believed is superior to the many devices so they can potentially utilize this.

Using your medical example. Number means only so much. A person may be pregnant with beta hCG level of 2000, or 10,000. The number goes down, is it concerning? Yes. depending on which stage of pregnancy. Again, it really depends on the context. The number may be valuable tool at specific time and situation; however, beyond which point, it may not mean as much.

Another more related example: How project butter works: http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/0...roject-butter-how-it-works-and-what-it-added/

If you had thought graphic processing is essentially done by CPU/GPU then there is technically no way that you can improve the smoothness of the graphic rendering because it is bounded by CPU/GPU. So how does project butter make it possible to achieve 60FPS? Using parallel processing (occasional triple buffer), and background processing (Vsync).

It is true that this would take your potential CPU/GPU power off of other application when it is in need. So if we had been playing a game that was putting CPU/GPU to their maximum full throttle all the time, those may no longer work. However, probably there are not that many games like that so overall user experience on day to day use is nothing but improvement.

There are people having issue with Jellybean update on Prime forum but I also see positive comment particularly addressing ANR and decreased/improved/resolved system lag/stutter while downloading/installing application. If these comments are to be believed then IO issue for the practical point of view is indeed fixed/solved/improved independent of benchmark score. Obviously other way is the same. Even benchmark score has improved, if these issues continue to show up then IO issue still exist OR afterall the issue may not had been due to IO but rather something else.

Above is my infinity Antutu score in normal/performance mode. No custom rom, build prop tweak. Just have bloatware off, and browser2ram installed. SD write speed is particularly low, which is why I believe in theory make sense to turn of fsync off or call less.

By the way, I truly enjoy this discussion with you Barry_H because it makes me think, and I know we have no right answer here but you are always professional and respective. ;)