tequila bomb

iPad has 256MB Memory. Twice as fast as 3GS.

Native performance

Test	iPad/3.2	iPhone 3GS/3.0	Faster by
100,000 iterations	0.000035 secs.	0.000137 secs.	3.91x
10,000 divisions	0.000010	0.000018	1.8x
10,000 sin(x) calls	0.000012	0.000018	1.5x
10,000 string allocations	0.004321	0.007915	1.83x
10,000 function calls	0.000338	0.000600	1.78x

This first benchmark compares the native performance of the iPad against the iPhone 3GS. The version of the iPhone OS is the one originally released with both devices (3.2 and 3.0, respectively.) The application used to test the devices was a release (optimized) build for ARM v7.

On average, the iPad is about twice as fast as the iPhone 3GS when executing native (Cocoa Touch) applications. Great news for developers, because it gives us much more flexibility when creating our apps.

Memory

Kind	Bytes	Megabytes
Physical (HW_PHYSMEM)	258,998,272	247 MB
User (HW_USERMEM)	210,284,544	200.5 MB

It’s likely that the device is using 256 MB memory chips with a portion of the total being used for other purposes, such as video memory. Also, developers have noted that all of the 200 MB of user memory is not available for use by apps. The OS and background apps make use of a large portion of that memory.

And last, and unfortunately least, we have the CPU speed reported by sysctl() using HW_CPU_FREQ. It’s zero: the A4 chip is truly magical. I guess that means we have to trust the spec sheet.