A Technical and Deeper Look into iPad 2′s A5 Processor

Now that the iPad2 has been unveiled, the rumor that the tablet will have an A5 processor has been confirmed. So far Apple has only shared that the A5 is up to twice as fast as the A4 while having approximately same power consumption. In this article we are going to share other details of the A5 you might not have known.

The processor, most likely dual-core Cortex-A9, is going to have ARM architecture. This usually has a clock speed of 1 GHz however Apple might underclock the cores to conserve battery life.
iPad2’s GPU will be up to 9 times faster than the PowerVR SGX535 of the original iPad. This points towards the iPad2 GPU being the multi-core PowerVR SGX543 GPU.

iPad2 will be running these things on the same 25Whr Li-Polymer battery as the one being used in the current iPad. The only difference between the battery systems in both iPads is their positioning: with the iPad2 the battery is positioned to the side instead of in the middle.

Apple has not yet confirmed the amount of RAM iPad 2 has. But we can safely assume the RAM will not be anything less than 512 MB. The current iPad has only 256 MB and an upgrade is certainly in order. Without the RAM upgrade, the increased speed of CPU and GPU will not make much sense.
According to Appleinsider’s report, iPad 2 is expected to have 512mb RAM:

Responding to a query about the amount of RAM in the iPad 2, analyst Kakeun Lee claimed on Twitter that the new iPad will double the amount of RAM in last year’s model. He also revealed that the new A5 processor features LPDDR2 memory, which is a speed boost from the LPDDR1 RAM in the first-generation iPad.

But to find that out, we have to wait for 11 March which is the official date when iPad 2 will be available.