Apple's iPad Gets a CPU Performance Review

iPad gets benchmarked.

By now, all major tier one publications have published their reviews of the iPad. All reviews seem to be generally positive, but so far none have put the iPad under any serious benchmarks and stress tests.

Our good friend Anand had his iPad delivered on Saturday, and has already run the unit through various tests. Although he's still working on an exhaustive review, the iPad, when compared to the iPhone 3GS and Google Nexus One seem to perform quite well.

The iPhone 3GS uses the ARM Cortex A8 CPU while Google's Nexus One uses Qualcomm's very speedy Snapdragon QSD8250 CPU. Both phones are fast by today's standards, but Apple's A4 CPU seems to stack up well against what's available.

"So how does Apple's A4 stack up against today's favorite smartphone brainchild? Extremely well. The A4 is particularly exciting because it combines Snapdragon-like CPU performance with a PowerVR SGX GPU. A much better option than the aging ATI core used in Qualcomm's QSD8x50 series," says Anand.

DISASSEMBLED: Apple's iPad Tablet

Today is iPad day and while many people are at home unwrapping their new toy and revelling in that fresh-out-of-the-box gadget smell, the folks at Rapid Repair are tearing their own iPad limb from limb.

They're still in the middle of the tear-down so while we're waiting to hear the final word on what's inside the tablet that has everybody talking, here's the first set of images from their tear-down. We'll add more images once Rapid Repair is done and hopefully we'll catch up with them for a little chat on what they found.

[UPDATE] Added all the extra images we could pull from Rapid Repair. If you want to check out the complete step-by-step disassembly, click here.

iPad hits is US

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-iEMW_5Ols