It's about the mobile GPU memory bandwidth per watt, folks

By SemiWiki

November 25, 2013

There has been a lot of huffing and puffing lately about 64-bit cores making it into the Apple A7 and other mobile SoCs, and we could probably dedicate a post to that discussion. However, there are a couple other wrinkles to the Apple A7 that should be getting a lot more attention.

There are two primary causes of user frustration in multimedia applications. The first is effects-based lag, that nasty symptom when your game starts out with pristine imagery, but chokes as the action progresses and more and more polygons each with textures and effects fly around in the carnage. The solution is to turn down the model fidelity options, or to get a newer GPU.

The other cause is why desktop graphics cards bring along a lot of their own fast DRAM: memory bandwidth is critical. Even the fastest GPU engine will burp if it runs out of incoming data, which is possible in an application like streaming video. Users will wait for a relatively short buffering period, but if the video stutters too much, attention is gone.

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