iPad 2 Benchmarks: Performance Is Not Doubled

Don’t you dare say that Steve Jobs lied on stage! He said it’s a billion times faster and damnit it must be. Here’s how Apple talks about the CPU change:

Dual-core A5 chip.
It’s fast, times two.

Two powerful cores in one A5 chip mean iPad can do twice the work at once. You’ll notice the difference when you’re surfing the web, watching movies, making FaceTime video calls, gaming, and going from app to app to app. Multitasking is smoother, apps load faster, and everything just works better.

Superfast graphics.
Go, gamers, go.

With up to nine times the graphics performance, gameplay on iPad is even smoother and more realistic. And faster graphics help apps perform better — especially those with video. You’ll see it when you’re scrolling through your photo library, editing video with iMovie, and viewing animations in Keynote.

Ok now to reality. Some benchmarks were run comparing the iPad and the iPad 2 and based on Javascript tests and Web browsing, there’s not a 2x change. In fact, it’s speculated that the cores are not dual Cortex A9 cores but instead A8 cores. Why? “Comparing the performance of an iPad 2 and an original iPad running the golden master build of iOS 4.3 released to developers last week, the iPad 2 only performed 1.5 times as fast.” So if you have an original iPad you don’t need to run out to get a new iPad 2 (and we covered the camera performance already). In fact, it seems like iOS 4.3 is the real gem here as an iPad 2 running iOS 4.2 ran 2.5x slower than when it ran iOS 4.3.

There’s still a ways to go here as more benchmarks, including graphic intensive apps are tested and all devices get the OS update. So, are you still in line?