iPad 2 is the most powerful iDevice currently available on the market, but according to an American researcher, Apple's tablet is as fast as a supercomputer from the 80s. Jack Dongarra, a professor at an American university and one of those working on the Linpack project that measures the computing power of computers, concluded that the iPad 2 is as powerful as the Cray 2 supercomputer. In the 80s, Cray, in the version with 8 processors, was the most powerful supercomputer in the world at that time, and the iPad 2 is only now reaching it in terms of processing power.
His research group has run the test on Apple's new iPad 2, and it turns out that the legal-pad-size tablet would be a rival for a four-processor version of the Cray 2 supercomputer, which, with eight processors, was the world's fastest computer in 1985.
Dr. Dongarra's researchers also discovered that the new iPad2 is about 10 times as fast as its predecessor, the original iPad. That is likely because of some design changes in the microprocessor used in the new version of the Apple tablet.
To date, the researchers have run the test on only one of the iPad microprocessor's two processing cores.
For now, Dongarra has only managed to test one of the 2 processors of the iPad 2 tablet and estimates that the new version of the tablet is 10 times more powerful than its predecessor. He estimates that the iPad 2 would register 1.5 -1.65 gigaflops in Linpack, but we will find that out only after they manage to use Linpack with both processors of the tablet.
