New performance benchmarks run on the iPad 2 underscore what the new tablets have already seen for themselves: Apple wasn’t exaggerating when they claimed that the second generation iPad is twice as fast as its predecessor. Tests done using common performance tools have shown improvements across the board, with floating point operations many times faster than the original iPad. While we don’t know for sure until someone takes a saw to the chip, the results are indicating that the A5 chip is packing dual Cortex-A9s. Apple usually never reveals what’s inside its devices and doesn’t publish specs on performance. This is purely a marketing strategy as Apple’s competitors, as well as repair shops and technically adept users – promptly tear apart every device as soon as it is released. With the custom Apple system on a chip (SoC) introduced with the iPhone 4, teardowns have gotten even more complex. However, using performance testing software, it’s possible to identify what the device is packing with a fair degree of certainty. The folks over at Engadget used Geekbench to benchmark the review iPad 2 before it was released, and found that it had 512 MB of RAM, a dual-core CPU clocked at 800 MHz. The Geekbench result of 721 was almost twice the original iPad’s 375. Anand Shimpi and his fellow crew at AnandTech have done the most exhaustive benchmarking yet, getting detailed results from Geekbench, Linpack, Javascript, and browser speed tests. The floating point unit on the iPd 2 has 400% better performance than the original iPad and integer calculations are closer to twice as fast. The memory bandwidth is also much improved and the increased power sows up in both single and multi-threaded tasks. Based on the results, Shimpi along with many other observers are concluding that the heart of the A5 chip is a pair of Cortex A9 cores and a dual-core PowerVR SGX545MP2 graphics coprocessor. What this means in reality is that the iPad 2 gives much faster and smoother performance than the original and that there’s that much more horsepower to do things such as advanced graphics manipulation and video that haven’t even been tried on the iPad yet. It is worth remembering that the Geekbench score is referenced against a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz, which gets 1000 on their combined test. The iPad 2?s score of 721 puts it on par with desktop computers like a 2005 PowerMac G4. It is pretty impressive for a $500 device without a keyboard. How many of you bought the iPad 2? If so, what do you think of the difference? Let us know in the comments below! As usual, stay tuned by following us on Twitter and/or subscribing to our RSS feed. [Source: AnandTech, Engadget] Authors:

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