Apple launched the iPad Pro 2018 series in an event held in NewYork, where the company is boasting about the new GPU that they have used in the product. Apple also updated the long forgotten Macbook air and it now has the improved specs and much higher price.
Now, the new iPad is a refresher it has a new design that resembles the iPhone 5 multiplied several times, it has several new features that come from the iPhone X. It now has the Face ID instead of the Touch ID which means there will be no home button and the whole UI will use gestures.
We have a lot to talk about the new Apple pencil but coming to the internals of the tablet, where the story is interesting. The iPad Pro is powered by the new A12X bionic chip made with the 7nm process, it is much better and faster than the A12 bionic present in the iPhone Xs or XS Max. The CPU uses 8 cores instead of 6 and the GPU is fundamentally different.
The 7 core GPU according to Apple is comparable in performance to the GPU present in the Xbox One S. The AMD chip present in the Xbox One S can produce graphical performance up to 1.4 Tflops which is still enough to play the modern AAA titles at a respectable framerates at 900p resolution.
Apple not only boasted about the GPU but also showed the example by running an intensive mobile game. The NBA 2k19 game made by 2k games ran smoothly at more than 60fps while producing 6 million pixels, and it is more than impressive for a mobile GPU. Usually, the games made for the mobile platform are designed in such a way that they can be played at most 30 frames per second but the new GPU in the iPad Pro is capable enough to play such titles at 60 FPS.
Another example that Apple showed in the event was Photoshop that uses both CPU and GPU but relies mainly on the CPU. While there is a mobile version of photoshop one Apple used to demonstrate was the full version that is built for the Mac windows or Linux based systems. During the conference the iPad had no issues running the photoshop, it even managed to stay thermally stable too.
While Apple is boasting about their new GPU, it cannot be compared with the GPU present in the Xbox console. We are still not a point where performance up to 1.4 TFLOPS can be achieved without ample cooling. Nevertheless, Apple’s new GPU is actually the right step towards the area where mobile chips would be enough to power the most demanding programs such as games, then we’ll be able to truly achieve a connected world.