Possible New ASUS Transformer Pad (2013) Benchmarks leak

One of the biggest sources of device leaks come from benchmark databases, and GFXBench's online database has just spilled the beans on an upcoming ASUS device running NVIDIA Tegra 4.

The unknown device's name only registers as "ASUS Eee Pad (Tegra 4, retina)". This is very odd, because the Eee Pad brand has vanished for over a year, as it was replaced by the Transformer Pad title. Now, I don't think a revival of the Eee Pad name is likely, so I assume we're dealing with a new Transformer Pad iteration here.

The leaked results point to a Eee Pad device, running Android 4.2.2, running on a 1.9GHz Tegra 4 processor and with a 2560 x 1600 display. That falls in line with the official specs of the upcoming 2013 Transformer Pad Infinity. The software build numbers (WW_epad-10.14.0.39.3) are in accordance with ASUS' usual firmware build numbers, which gives these results more authenticity. 

The device's performance is pretty much in line with what the Tegra 4 has produced so far. Analyzing the very shader intensive T-Rex HD tests, You can see that, while the Tegra 4 can't quite outperform the iPad 4, it gets extremely close to it, to an extent that the difference in framerate is negligible (granted, the iPad 4 is 10 months old now, and it still has the lead). An impressive feat is that, on the Onscreen test, the Tegra 4 can keep itself very close to the iPad 4 despite the fact that it's pushing about 1 million pixels more. The performance hit for all these pixels should be much larger, so something about the Tegra 4's architecture helps it scale performance well as resolution increases.

The Egypt HD test looks a bit worse for the Tegra 4. At normalized resolution, it can push a respectable 50 fps, but it's still about 5 fps behing the iPad 4, and in this test, the higher resolution seems to penalize the GPU more, as the gap increases to a 13 fps difference between the two. It can still push 30 fps though, which proves the Tegra 4 is capable of playing most mobile games at native resolution while keeping a fluent framerate.

Fill test was always Apple's forte and at the same time NVIDIA's achilles' heel, and while fill rate isn't as horrendous as it was on the Tegra 3, thanks to Tegra 4's dual-channel (finally) DDR3 memory subsystem, it's still significantly behind the iPad 4, and even the Nexus 10. 1130 MTexels/s is a decent score, but falls begin the iPad 4's 2089 MTexels/s capability. This could be especially a problem at this extremely high resolution. While Tegra 4's memory bandwidth should be enough for most games, even with its resolution, a few games could suffer slight performance hits due to limited memory bandwidth, but I think that's only to occur later in the future. 

Triangle throughput isn't bad in the Tegra 4, as it can keep up with the Mali-T604 in the Nexus 10 and the Adreno 320, but, again, this is another speciality of PowerVR GPUs, as the iPad 4 and its PowerVR SGX 554MP4 trumps anything Android-based in terms of triangle throughput. But still, there shouldn't be any bottlenecks caused by triangle throughput in this device. 

I would take this information with a grain of salt, as there is no way of confirming the validity of these results. However, the fact that the results seem to fall in line with other Tegra 4 devices, and the specs reported are in accordance with ASUS' upcoming Transformer Pad Infinity tablet (more info here), and the firmware naming scheme seems pretty real, add up to make a big chance of this being a real device, probably the new Infinity. The 10-incher Android tablet is expected to launch in this quarter, so these results might indicate it will launch very soon.

New ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity Announced At Computex 2013: 1600p Display and NVIDIA Tegra 4 on board

ASUS is announcing a wide variety of mobile devices at its Computex 2013 event, - innovative and quirky alike - together with its latest flagship 10-inch tablet, a refreshed version of the Transformer Pad Infinity. While it doesn't, so far, appear to bring any big change to the Transformer Pad line, and in fact is more of a refresh, as the new Transformer Pad Infinity brings with it a very competitive high-resolution display and what must be the fastest mobile SoC yet.

The new Infinity uses the same kind of display as the last-gen Infinity, that is, a bright Super IPS+ display, however, the new Infinity receives a significant bump in terms of resolution, as it has a resolution of 2560 x 1600 (vs the 1920 x 1200 of the "old" Infinity), and a pixel density of 299ppi (vs 224ppi in the old Infinity), which beats the 264ppi of the iPad 4 and is on par with the Nexus 10's display. There's no data to back this up right now, but based on previous Transformers with the same Super IPS+ display, the display will probably have the same excellent blacks, and also unsurpassed screen brightness which characterizes the Super IPS+ display, which results in very good contrast from these displays. However, ASUS' tablet displays tend to reproduce rather washed out colors. We can't be sure these characteristics of ASUS tablet displays will also be present on the new Infinity, but it's definitely a possibility. Like the old Infinity, the new version will also have its display protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 2.

It's clear now how tablet cameras are really not that important, since ASUS actually downgraded the camera from the old Infinity to the new one (8MP vs 5MP), hence (almost) all modern tablets have 5MP cameras, which only shows how tablets, especially 10-inch ones, aren't adequate for taking pictures and videos.

One very interesting aspect of the new Transformer Pad Infinity is its internals. In fact, it is one of the first devices to use NVIDIA's powerful Tegra 4 System-on-Chip. Basically, it is an SoC built on power efficient 28nm process, which supports an optional Icera 3G/4G modem (hence, we may see an LTE variant of the Infinity). The SoC itself consists of four powerful Cortex A15 cores ticking at 1.9GHz, with an additional low frequency Cortex A15 core for handling light workloads with very little power consumption, with a 2 GB of RAM memory and a memory interface of 32-bit dual-channel DDR3-1899 (17.1 GB/s) and a whopping 72-core GPU. Thanks to the powerful GPU and outstanding memory bandwidth, the Infinity will fare very well with complex 3D games despite its mind blowing resolution.

Last but not least, the new Transformer Pad Infinity, much like every Transformer device preceding it, will have an optional keyboard dock that essentially turns the device into an Android Ultrabook, plus enhances connectivity and battery life. In fact, Pad + Dock combined will have a total battery capacity of 18,000 mAh; much more than the iPad 4's 11,000 (ish) mAh battery.

The Transformer Pad Infinity will be released in the coming months (no specific dates were given though), and so far is confirmed to ship with 32 GB of storage (a 64 GB version is likely to be released too). Pricing is still unknown but the 32 GB version will probably cost $499, corresponding to the last gen Infinity and competitive with other tablets. On paper, the ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity looks like it will place itself ahead of the current top tablets (specifically, the iPad 4 and the Google Nexus 10), or will at least be on par with them, in terms of display, design, performance, etc.