Consumer Reports on iPad 2: 'We Didn't Notice Any Significant Speed Improvement'

Consumer Reports has published their first look at the Apple iPad 2 in which they "didn't notice any significant speed improvement".

One major difference in tech specs is that the iPad 2 has a new processor that's supposed to make it far speedier than the original. While performing routine tasks such as Web browsing and e-mail in our tests, we didn't notice any significant speed improvement, as CR Senior Program Leader Dean Gallea notes in our video (right). The biggest speed boost, a 9x improvement in graphics processing, should be apparent when you run demanding 3D games, but it's not clear whether any games that take advantage of that higher speed are yet available. Surely some are in the pipeline for the coming months.

We aren't quite sure how Consumer Reports was unable to notice what is clearly a significant speed difference.


Anandtech benchmarked the new iPad 2 and said, "Our SoC investigation mostly focused on CPU performance, which we found to be a healthy 50% faster than the A4 in the original iPad - at least in web browsing. We were able to exceed Apple's claim of up to 2x performance increase in some synthetic tests, but even a 50% increase in javascript and web page loading performance isn't anything to be upset about. "