Apple switched from ARM Cortex A8 to A9. There were a lot of improvements. The change from in order to out of order was huge. L2 cache doubled to 1MB. Memory b

Apple switched from ARM Cortex A8 to A9. There were a lot of improvements. The change from in order to out of order was huge. L2 cache doubled to 1MB. Memory bandwidth doubled. The FPU got properly pipelined too. RAM also doubled to 512MB. In combination, this translates into 20% better integer performance and double the FPU performance. This is pretty close to what other chips saw moving to A9. For stuff like web browsing, that FPU update basically doubled performance and made the iPad 2 much more useful to consumers. On the GPU front, Apple themselves made the 9x claim, but Anandtech showed closer to 6x. That’s still a massive improvement. If something was limited by the previous 256MB RAM, that 9x number becomes very believable.