iPad 2 pwns and owns the competition

It’s official! Apple’s iPad 2 pwns and owns the competition – at least when it comes to raw graphics horsepower. 

To be sure, the sleek and sexy iPad 2 boasts advanced, multiple core SGX graphics (courtesy of Imagination Technologies) that are integrated into the tablet’s screaming fast A5 SoC.

According to recent benchmark scores tallied by AnandTech, the next-gen processor is 3 to 7 times faster than the original iPad chip and handily outpaces Nvidia’s Tegra 2.

“The SGX543 shader pipeline can execute twice the number of instructions per clock as the SGX 535 [in A4], and then there are four times as many pipes in an SGX 543MP2 as there are in a 535,” explained Anand Lal Shimpi. 

“There are also efficiency improvements as well. Hidden surface removal works at twice the rate in the 543MP2 as it did in the 535. There’s also a big boost in texture filtering performance.”

As AppleInsider’s Daniel Eran Dilger notes, Cupertino is currently working with Imagination Technologies to build even faster mobile chips which pair ARM GPU cores with SGX graphics processor cores.

In addition, Epic recently tweaked its popular Infinity Blade title to exploit the second-gen iPad’s graphics processing power, thereby optimizing gameplay with higher resolution and anti-aliasing.

[Via AppleInsider & AnandTech]