Sweeney described conventional game consoles as seeing "a 10-20x leap in performance every 7-8 years," compared to the 9x leap Apple claimed for the iPad 2 in j

Sweeney described conventional game consoles as seeing "a 10-20x leap in performance every 7-8 years," compared to the 9x leap Apple claimed for the iPad 2 in just one annual refresh. This is true, but it's not "astonishing". Conventional game consoles usually push the limits of graphics when they're first released. The iPad didn't push graphics when it was first released, so Apple had a lot of room for "easy" GPU improvement with the iPad 2. Whether we continue to see order-of-magnitude leaps in performance depends on how much "head-room" is left in mobile GPUs, and how improvements in conventional GPUs trickle down to mobile devices.