The speed

[supersteve1]

Can anyone tell me if the speed is a lot faster on the ipad2 compared to the ipad1.
And also is there loads more stuff on it.

 

[sjleworthy]

Do a tiny bit of research - thats the essence of what people have been talking about!

 

[NumbLock]

Apple iPad 2 Preview - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

Summary: Dramatic improvement and way better than the Xoom

 

[supersteve1]

Thank you for the comments, the reason why i asked was that some people said that it was a lot faster, were as some people said it was no faster than the ipad 1.

 

[Tim SPRACKLEN]

Thank you for the comments, the reason why i asked was that some people said that it was a lot faster, were as some people said it was no faster than the ipad 1.

As you know, the iPad2 has a dual-core CPU (i.e. two processors on the same chip). Notionally, Apple have said that this dual core CPU - they call it the A5 - runs at 1 GHz (i.e. one billion clock cycles per second - though see below). The new iPad operating system iOS 4.3 has reportedly been designed to take advantage of this dual-core processor, as well as the additional system memory (RAM) up from 256 MB on the iPad1 to 512 MB on the iPad2.

Any good operating system takes as little system resource as possible - as little system memory, as little CPU 'capacity', as little I/O (input/output) in order to leave as much resource as possible for the application programs (apps) which, after all, are of the most interest and relevance to the user.

So, unless we see apps specifically designed to take advantage of the iPad2's new capabilities - CPU & RAM - we may not see too much in the way of improved performance. If the OS originally took, say, 10% of the CPU 'capacity' and the app the remaining 90%, optimising the OS so that it even took 0% of the CPU resource, would still leave the overall app only appearing to offer a marginal improvement. It would require the apps to be optimised too before the user would see any significant benefit from the new processor and RAM.

However, there is a further dimension to this. Apple claim that the graphics 'engine' of the iPad2 (GPU - graphics processing unit) has been improved by a factor of 9! It doesn't matter how fast the CPU runs, if the app is graphics intensive and the GPU cannot 'render' (display) the screen in a timely fashion, the user experience will be less-than-favourable. So we would expect to see graphics intensive apps - games and videos - showing the most improvement when running on the iPad2.

So, whether your experience with the iPad2 is significantly better than with the iPad1 will therefore depend on whether your primary application is graphics intensive - videos and games - or computationally intensive - say spreadsheets.

The link below shows some 'benchmark' tests that were run on the iPad1 and iPad2 in order to compare the performance.

iPad 2 Benchmarks Blast Competition, Show Less-than-1GHz Processor Speed – SlashGear

One should always view benchmarks with a degree of sceptisim - they are intended to be a representative set of programs that can be run on multiple 'platforms' to provide an objective comparison of the speed of those platforms. However, by their very nature, benchmarks are not truly representative of end-user applications and therefore, at best, provide only a crude indicator of the relative performance under artificial conditions.

If the performance of the iPad2 is a key issue for you there's only one way to resolve it - head on down to the local Apple Store and try-before-you-buy. The iPads in the store typically have a wide range of sample apps loaded for you to try. Some stores even have the iPad1 and iPad2 next to each other so that you can perform a more objective comparison.

Whatever you decide, I'm sure that you'll really enjoy your iPad.

Tim
Scotland

 

[epb]

Thank you for the comments, the reason why i asked was that some people said that it was a lot faster, were as some people said it was no faster than the ipad 1.

Both are true - for most things, it's not world-changing fast, but for video/graphics tasks it's much faster/smoother.

 

[Hasty]

Steve at the moment the software isn't making full use of the potential of the new iPad, but in a few months time I expect to see apps that are developed to exploit it.
I think Garage Band and iMovie were deliberately released by Apple to demonstrate the ability of the new hardware.

 

[Mountainbikermark]

Hasty ,I read somewhere last night, app start I think, that they were released for that very reason

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This post was Tapatalk approved.

 

[supersteve1]

Thank you for all of your comments, well appreciated, I have definately learned a lot, so thanks for that.