Posted in: Mobile computers

Apple iPad JavaScript benchmark results are in, the A4 CPU fails to impress

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With the Apple iPad coming with a upsized iPhone OS, as opposed to a full-fledged desktop OS, it’s pretty hard to find an objective benchmark to see if its great performance is down to powerful hardware or superb software optimization. The closest we can get to a proper benchmark is by installing the Safari browser on an Atom-based netbook and running some JavaScript tests with it.

We compared the Apple iPad’s 1 GHz ARM A4 CPU to the 1.6GHz N270 Atom processor that is found inside the Lenovo S10e netbook and the 1.2 GHz VIA C7-M ULV CPU of the Gigabyte M704. And while those are some of the least powerful chips you can find on the portable computer market they were still found out to be faster than the iPad’s unit by a country mile.

The score that the iPad achieved at the JavaScript benchmark we ran was a mere 41, compared to 82 for the 1.2 GHz VIA CPU and 106 for the 1.6 GHz Atom. The results look even less favorable for the iPad when we consider that both of these processors are already a few years old.

So maybe Apple did have some good reason for going with the iPhone OS for the iPad – a full-fledged Mac OS might have been a bit more than its hardware could swallow.

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