Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
The performance of the graphics part in the iPhone 4S has been blown away by the capabilities of the graphics core at the heart of a $25 computer, the credit card sized Raspberry Pi.
According to Broadcom, the Raspberry Pi outclasses the graphical performance of the 4S by a factor of two “across a range of content”.
“I was on the team that designed the graphics core, so I’m a little biased here, but I genuinely believe we have the best mobile GPU team in the world at Broadcom in Cambridge,” executive director Eben Upton told Digital Foundry in response to chatter about the Broadcom BCM2835’s performance compared to NVIDIA’s Tegra 2.
“What’s really striking is how badly Tegra 2 performs relative even to simple APs using licensed Imagination Technologies (TI and Apple) or ARM Mali (Samsung) graphics. To summarise, BCM2835 has a tile mode architecture – so it kills immediate-mode devices like Tegra on fill-rate – and we’ve chosen to configure it with a very large amount of shader performance, so it does very well on compute-intensive benchmarks, and should double iPhone 4S performance across a range of content.”
The Raspberry Pi’s CPU isn’t such a powerhouse, but the single core 700MHz ARM11 remains impressive for a $25 device.
The first batch of 10,000 Raspberry Pi units is in production with the launch coming very soon.
