iPad 2 Browser Benchmarks

The iPad 2, Steve Jobs took to the stage to tell us, offers twice the performance of the original iPad and 9x the graphics performance, thanks to its dual-core 1GHz Apple A5 processor. Still, what does that mean for daily use? Considering most people spend their time on tablets browsing, we ran some side-by-side SunSpider benchmarking on Apple's old and new iPads to see how the new model shaped up. Check out the results after the cut.

SunSpider, for those unfamiliar, tests core JavaScript performance with a variety of tasks intended to replicate real-world behaviors. So, it generates a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, performs cryptography tests and code decompression, and other tasks that might be encountered in everyday browsing.

In SunSpider, a lower score is better, and the iPad 2 proved more than 4x as fast as the iPad overall. The original tablet scored 8594.9ms, while the iPad 2 managed 2121.7ms. Among the individual benchmarks the iPad 2 scored 263.4ms in 3D testing (vs 1202.2ms), 265.0ms in access (vs 1247.1ms), and 142.8ms in cryptography (vs 572.7ms).

Now, there's more to browsing than just JavaScript of course, but this is a pretty first fantastic showing from the new Apple slate.

Click the image below for the full-sized results; the iPad 2 is on the left, the iPad on the right.