Surface Pro 3 Dominates the iPad Air 2 in Nearly All Benchmarks

[dgstorm]

It turns out that the new iPad Air 2 (despite its powerful new A8X mobile chip) gets crushed by the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 in a series of Geekbench benchmarks. The website Laptopmag.com recently put a number of flagship tablets through their paces and the Surface Pro 3 was the hands-down superior device in these tests. The iPad Air 2 was able to best the Surface Pro 3 in a few benchmarks, like battery life and brightness, but the superior hardware in the Surface Pro 3 came out ahead in most of the metrics.

Of course, it probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise, especially considering that the Surface Pro 3 is basically filled with PC internals. It's designed to replace a laptop, yet includes tablet functionality, so this isn't exactly comparing the same fruit. Regardless, that is precisely what distinguishes Microsoft's product from other tablets, and is exactly what they intended. It's also considerably more expensive than the iPad Air 2, so there's that to consider.

It will be interesting to see how things shake out when Apple releases their 12-inch iPad Pro, and Microsoft launches the next-generation Surface Pro 4. Pretty soon it will be hard to distinguish tablets from PCs at all.

 

[GreyFox7]

Laptop Mag: iPad Air 2 review - Con: Multitasking could be better.

Nicely understated. There is no multitasking. It runs one app for one user.

 

[Kif]

In my mind it's amazing how close Apple is getting to Intel with their custom Arm design. Usually in the product breakdowns it is shown that the A series processors usually cost Apple less than $20 to produce. I would bet MS is paying Intel a lot more money for the Haswell processors. The A series chips usually have an advantage regarding performance per watt. This should be warning to Intel not to sit back on their laurels.

 

[Lobo]

Wow, an x86 chip is actually faster than ARM. I'm speechless.

Let me guess, next topic: "Cray cluster dominating PS4"?

 

[leeshor]

I don't feel that trying to compare a Linux derivative with a GUI front end to Windows wasn't a fair fight to start with.

 

[benjitek]

It's not really an Apples-to-Apples comparison, odd that anyone would even bother, much less publish -- possibly someone trying to meet an article quota?

 

[GreyFox7]

It seemed to start from a comparison of the iPad Air 2 with a 2013 MBA. of course there's been plenty of speculation about iOS OSX merger/consolidation n whatnot.

If you think about it there are some interesting dynamics and not just on the hardware front but software too. ok back to hardware... the A8X is a 3 core CPU, something of an oddity (no pun intended). It scores on the specific Geekbench tests close to the i5 in the 2013 MBA.
"The A8X CPU manages single- and multi-threaded scores of 1812 and 4477 — while the Core i5-4250U is at 2281 and 4519"
It also scores about 1/3 higher than the Dual Core Tegra K1 on the multicore test.
In that respect the high end ARM parts are approaching low end premium x86 parts but there's lower end to x86.

A little on x86 ... consumers are presented with a raft of low end cheap tablets and PCs featuring Atom chips which is where things start to get twisted up. End user experience now becomes diluted with suboptimal performance on the low end and there's overlap or performance is bested by ARM options for their use cases. Choice now moves to the software you want to run.

If you go back 20-25 years history could repeat with the upstart unseating the incumbent, the parallels abound. The timing couldn't be more perfect. Right at a time when a transition from legacy x86 code to modern x86 code is happening or is it. There certainly are many who would choose Anything But Microsoft because of long standing hatred. I doubt there's any love lost between many hardware vendors and Intel either.

Hmm, Does RT run on an iPad?
How long (months) before there's a quad core 64 bit ARM SoC?

The Chinese Curse: May you live in interesting times.

 

[MrElectrifyer]

The fact that it's ARM becoming almost as powerful as the latest Intel x86 processors speaks a lot for the potential competition. Like it's almost on par with the Ivy Bridge first gen Surface Pro and 2012 MacBook Air (http://bit.ly/1nywYWZ), perhaps the next generation would be twice as fast and overtake Intel x86 processors in performance.

Unfortunately, the OS on such ARM devices is still stupidly bastardized compared to Windows 8 Pro. If Apple can do some magic trick and make iOS as versatile as Mac OS X, then there'll be some competition for the Surface Pro from the Apple side...they'll just be lacking ports and digitizer-pen support.

It's also considerably more expensive than the iPad Air 2, so there's that to consider.

Actually, the 64GB iPad is $700 whereas the 64GB Surface Pro is $800...they're pretty close in price despite the iPad being stupidly limited.

 

[MrElectrifyer]

BTW, anyone else having a hard time browsing through the Laptomag bench mark results in Internet Explorer 11 (desktop or touch) and Firefox 33? The buttons aren't responding at all (regardless if I enable or disable my extensions). Attempted viewing them on my iPhoen 4s (running iOS 6) and it worked...I'll avoid jumping to speculations here.

Either ways, having looked through the benchmark results, it's interesting that the Surface Pro 3 got the worst score in the so-called "OpenOffice Calc Spreadsheet" benchmark...won't be surprised if an XCEL benchmark test speaks totally different.

 

[GreyFox7]

BTW, anyone else having a hard time browsing through the Laptomag bench mark results in Internet Explorer 11 (desktop or touch) and Firefox 33? The buttons aren't responding at all (regardless if I enable or disable my extensions). Attempted viewing them on my iPhoen 4s (running iOS 6) and it worked...I'll avoid jumping to speculations here.

Either ways, having looked through the benchmark results, it's interesting that the Surface Pro 3 got the worst score in the so-called "OpenOffice Calc Spreadsheet" benchmark...won't be surprised if an XCEL benchmark test speaks totally different.

I have see that same control (code module) they're using on other sites and it doesn't work there either. Based on some other recent articles I have seen discussing web standards it's likely using a non-standard, Google or Apple, function. To some it's more important to code cool than code correct.