iPad 4 more than twice as fast as iPad 3, benchmarks reveal

The fourth-generation iPad, or iPad 4, appears to be a major upgrade over the third-gen iPad 3, according to new benchmark tests.

Apple executives including CEO Tim Cook took the stage at a special press conference last Tuesday to introduce the new iPad, along with the iPad Mini and other new devices.

"This 4th generation is a powerhouse," Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller told the audience and viewers. "What's inside it? A new chip, the A6X. It doubles the performance of CPU tasks."

That's a big promise, but according to the latest report, Schiller's claim that the iPad 4 has double the power may have even been a little conservative.

The numbers don't lie

In TechRadar's side-by-side comparison of the iPad 4 and iPad 3, we noted that the new Apple tablet, dubbed the "iPad with Retina display" despite the last iPad carrying the same screen, might not be a significant upgrade.

But according to a new report from Slashgear, the iPad 4 has more than twice the processing power of its predecessor.

That may in fact be due to Apple's new A6 chip. The benchmark results indicate that the iPad 4's A6 chip clocks in at 1.4GHz, up from the last iPad's 1GHz A5 processor.

The iPad 4's quad-core graphics likely don't hurt, either, and the device doesn't appear to suffer from having the same 1GB of RAM that the last iPad did.

Apple's new A6 chip is also found in the iPhone 5, where it clocks in at 1.3GHz, and according to the same benchmark report, the latest iPhone more than doubles the iPad 3's power as well.

Is it worth an upgrade?

Apple revealed some interesting figures during the iPad press conference, including that 100 million iPads have been sold, and that iPads make up 91 percent of all tablet web traffic.

Apple's previous iPad, the third-gen model with Retina display, was released in March, so some users might be understandably hesitant to upgrade to the iPad 4.

The fourth-gen Apple tablet is priced starting at $US499/£399/AUD$539 for the 16GB Wi-Fi version, while $US629/£499/AUD$679 is the starting price for the same size iPad 4 with LTE data.

TechRadar also compared the iPad 4 to the Microsoft Surface RT, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, and the Asus Tranformer Prime.