sjleworthy said:
I'm curious.
Does the extra quad processing on the chip just go to powering the new screen? How much extra is left to speed up the general processing tasks? Will the new iPad 'feel' faster and smoother, or not? o does it just compensate for the consumption of the power hungry screen?
The a5x chip actually has two "chips" inside. It consists of a dual core cpu and quad core gpu. The cpu handles the calculations and operations of the ios, and the interactions of all the other hardware components (touch input, mic input, etc).
The gpu alters memory in such a way so as to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display (source wikipedia). In other words the gpu is a specialized version of the cpu in that its made to crunch numbers faster when related to displaying 3d polygons or images onto the screen.
The only thing that was beefed up from the a5 to a5x is the gpu, plus the supposed system memory which is now 1 gig compared to half that on the ipad 2. Take the game series infinity blade; its currently the most visual game out for ios in terms of graphics. As long as you have a decent cpu, your main limiting factor to make better looking apps is system ram (to an certain point) and a fast gpu. The faster the gpu can go, the more polygons can be displayed onscreen without slowing down the frame rate. When you play any game that has a pause or loading screen after pressing the play button, thats the app loading all the images, music, and animations into the system memory so that when you are playing that level or game, there won't be any noticeable stuttering or hiccups during your play session.
Thats why some game developers suggest you to have few to no extra apps running in the background when you play the more graphic intensive Games as those apps are sharing that system memory. When the ram gets overloaded, it sometimes ends up 'crashing' the current app you are running. Rarely it may even freeze up the ios and may cause a reboot to occur, but that is rare. For non game related apps some of you may experience stuttering when you are scrolling text and graphics. This is mostly due to the ram limits and also the cpu trying to complete a few tasks before continuing.
Example try going to
http://engadget.com on your ipad and let the page load fully and then scroll down the entire page really fast and then scroll back up from the bottom really fast. With an ipad 2 scrolling to the bottom you should see all the text and graphics fly by, but scroll back up quickly near the top of the site it will be blank because even though it just displayed all those images and text, it may of had to purge some of that data and put it back into memory because it wasn't expecting you to go back up to the top (how it was programmed). But doing this same task on the new ipad, it may keep all of that data into memory and show all of that text and images without an issue.
So you will see a smoother experience overall with faster, better hardware; even with the higher res screen. Developers can also take it a step further and add extra stuff that only the ipad 3 will be able to handle. They already do that with ipad 2 enhanced games. Slight graphical improvements over playing that same game on the ipad 1. While all current apps and games designed for the ipad platform will work on the new ipad, developers will have to update them with higher resolution text/images/videos and even a higher 3d polygon count to take full advantage of the new screen and power.
I typed a little more than i expected to, but hope that helps to explain what we'll see with the new hardware.