Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, Tegra 3 Unleashed

Name: Asus Eee Pad Tranformer Prime
Brand: Asus

by Dave Altavilla — Thursday, December 01, 2011, 01:00 AM EDT

Performance: CPU and Web Browsing

Test Methodology: In all of our test vehicles for the following benchmarks, we ran each tablet at its performance optimized settings where available, with the exception of the Eee Pad Transformer Prime, which was tested at Normal and Balanced power profile settings. Normal mode on the Prime offers the full performance of its NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor, whereas Balanced mode compromises performance a bit to conserve power, capping the CPU at 1.2GHz max frequency. Beyond that, each tablet was also connected to a wall power source to ensure full performance. Here's a quick spec rundown for each tablet tested.

Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime - NVIDIA Tegra 3 1.3GHz Quad-Core
Asus Eee Pad Transformer - NVIDIA Tegra 2 1GHz Dual-Core
Apple iPad 2 - Apple A5 Dual-Core
Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet - NVIDIA Tegra 2 1GHz Dual-Core
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 - NVIDIA Tegra 2 1GHz Dual-Core
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus - 1.2GHz Samsung Exynos Dual Core

In the following tests, we take a look at how the Eee Pad Transformer Prime compares to other tablets by running a few common benchmarks that are currently available in the Android Marketplace. The first two tests are general purpose computing type benchmarks.

CPU Performance testing

Android CPU testing

Unfortunately, the iOS version of Linpack is different enough that we couldn't compare iPad 2 numbers in this test, and still get an apples-to-apples match-up (no pun intended). However, versus the other Tegra 2 slates here, as well as Samsung's Exynos dual-core processor, NVIDIA's Tegra 3 offers almost 2X the performance at the Prime's "Normal" performance mode setting.

Web Browser Performance testing

Android Browser Testing

The above two tests are browser-based benchmarks designed to determine a target device's performance with respect to Javascript processing and HTML rendering. Righware's Browser Mark specifically looks at browser performance, whereas SunSpider solely looks at Javascript. In general, these are lightly threaded workloads. Here NVIDIA's Tegra 3 and the Transformer Prime offer a significant performance upside versus the previous generation Tegra 2 slates. In BrowserMark, the Prime is the fastest device, besting Apple's iPad 2 by about 10% at its fastest setting. In SunSpider, the Galaxy Tab 7 Plus and iPad 2 take the lead by about the same margin over the Transformer Prime, where shorter rendering times equal better performance.