iPad 4 Speed Testing

Put a fourth-generation iPad down next to a third-generation iPad, and good luck telling them apart. In fact, the only difference between the two is what kind of cable you plug into them. The fourth generation iPad joins the iPhone 5, iPad mini, iPod touch, and iPod nano in sporting Apple’s new Lightning connector.

All the big changes take places internally: in particular the presence of the all-new A6X chipset. This contains a custom Apple designed 32nm 1.4GHz dual-core processor (based on the ARMv7) with quad-core GPU running at 300Mhz. Apple claims that this offers twice the performance of the A5 chip found in the iPad 3. (The A6 processor, found in the iPhone 5, incidentally is a dualcore, triple-coregraphics chipset).

Our iPad 4 GeekBench 2 test reported that the A6X was 1.39GHz with 1GB of RAM – 988MB for our exact sample. The GeekBench 2 benchmark results returned a new record of 1764 (the iPad 3 scored in the region of 759) and in the SunSpider JavaScript test the iPad 4 managed a speedy average of 840ms. Graphics performance on the iPad 4 was also considerably faster than the iPad 3. We performed a iPad 4 graphic benchmark using GLBenchmark 2.51. with a frame rate of 183fps (compared to 123fps for the iPad 3 and 86fps for the iPad mini).

This is potentially good news for gaming on iOS, which could take a big leap forward in the coming year (especially as these boosts are also replicated in the iPhone 5). Some
recent games on iOS are already looking on par with the previous generation of consoles (Xbox and PS2) and it won’t be long before they’re visually similar to the current generation.

But here and now there’s little difference in graphical navigation, or iOS. Zooming around Apple Maps felt a little faster. Demanding apps such as iMovie and Garageband may also display notable improvements when rendering video and music. But on the whole we don’t think there’s a big difference between the iPad 4 that’s on sale, and the iPad 3 that it replaces: at least not for the time being.

We also measured web performance, using Page Load, SunSpider and WebVizBench. The iPad 4 got the fastest score on two out of three (SunSpider and WebVizBench) although the new iPad mini beat it just slightly on Page Load (6.7sec for the iPad mini compared to 7.1sec for the iPad 4). Considering the iPad mini doesn’t have the Retina Display that’s a pretty good achievement, and the difference was only .400ms. On the whole the iPad 4 is manifestly the fastest iPad on the market, and the fastest one ever made. It’s high performance will ensure good compatibility with apps for many years to come.

Speed testing the iPad 4
Fourth-generation iPad is faster, stronger, better 
By Mark Hattersley
The Complete Guide to the iPad 4