ASUS' $149 MemoPad HD 7: Quad-Core Cortex A7, 1280x800 IPS Display

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• leecbaker - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link

  Is this Android? Estimated battery life? Article is kind of uncharacteristically weak on details...

• teiglin - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link

  You can see it's Android by looking at the screenshots. Though I do agree that some of these last posts would probably have looked better in the context of a liveblog or similar overarching coverage of ASUS's Computex press event. Although it arguably feels like pageview-padding, I don't mind seeing things split out like this for clarity's sake.

• Pirks - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link

  stupid asus fucks can't even provide for microsd card slot in this thing, fuck asus, surface ftw!

• Rockmandash12 - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link

  It has a micro sd card.

• Chaser - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link

  FTW if they give them away.

• hamsteyr - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link

  Interesting. Any idea on the processor manufacturer?
  
  The only one I know that makes A7 Quads is MediaTek or AllWinner, but it almost seems unlikely for Asus to pick up these processors.

• Alien959 - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link

  Why, I know Acer uses them, but anyway quad core mediaTek is nothing special performance wise being quad core http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Amoi-N828-Smar... but for the price is more the enough.

• teiglin - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link

  I do sometimes wonder who decides to make this sort of thing quad-core. Is it a problem where they are just filling space with relatively small A7 cores because of i/o, or just marketing (four cores are obviously better than two, amirite guys!!!)? I mean, nobody buying a $150 tablet does so because they expect high-end performance. Since the vast majority of tasks--especially mobile tasks--don't benefit from the extra cores, I find it hard to believe that it would be worth any increase in die area to add more cpu cores, even if "quadcore" makes it sound faster and maybe increases your linpack score.

• aryonoco - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link

  What are you basing this on? Have you done some actual modelling?
  
  Cause I have real world tests and simulations test results right in front of me, and I can tell you that at least when it comes to Android, due to multi-threaded nature of the OS, due to the fact that each app runs as a different user... and most importantly due to the way Davlvik JIT works (hint: it's very SMP optimized) quad-core does actually make a difference.
  
  And this is Cortex A7 we are talking about. Single-threaded performance is really slow. If you have a many cheap Chinese smartphone and tablets which use these MTK chips, if you look at their last gen products which used dual-core A7 and then compare them with recent products (say Jiayu G3 with MTK 6577 processor vs. Jiayu G4 with MTK 6589 processors) you can see how much of difference those extra 2 cores make.

• Azurael - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link

  Not sure I agree... There may be some cases outside of the utterly artificial 'usual' Android benchmarks, but 99% of the time, disabling 2 cores on my (now sadly deceased) One X [Tegra 3], Nexus 7 [Tegra 3] and Nexus 4 [S4 Pro] makes no difference to actually using the devices other than the extended battery life. Even in games.
  
  In fact, my partner's Nexus 10 (also running AOKP PUB) is the fastest ARM-based Android device I've used, despite the somewhat overstretched GPU and the fact that it gets thrashed in benchmarks by the Nexus 4... I'd conclude that a more complex or higher clocked dual core is a much better bet for Android right now.