When Apple launched its iPhone 4 and first-gen iPad, the company introduced its brand new Apple A4 processor which is based on a Cortex A8 processor. Now that the iPad 2 is out, Apple called it an A5 dual-core processor, and 9 times more powerful than the A4 in terms of graphic. However, they never really mentioned the actual specs, and thanks to sites like Anandtech and IOSnoops we know have a slight understanding of the spec.

Thanks to iFixit we now know that the iPad 2 has a 512MB memory, but we don’t know of the processor’s speed. But after some running some benchmark software, people are reporting that the dual-core ARM chip is actually clocked at 900MHz, which probably is the sweet spot of the processor. It’s not confirmed to be a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 chip, but it’s a dual-core ARM v7 that performed relatively similar when it comes to non-graphical tests.

The graphic SoC that’s tagging along is also very powerful; in fact it outshines Nvidia’s Tegra 2 at times. The GPU is a dual-core PowerVR SGX543MP2. The GPU doesn’t seem to perform 9 times better than the original iPad in real world, but it does smoke the rest of it. It rendered 57.6 frames per second in a GLBenchmark test where the (admittedly higher-res) Tegra 2 tablet managed only 26.7fps, and last year’s iPad pulled only 17.6fps. Nvidia won’t like this news at all.

SOURCE via Anandtech