The silicon fiends out there will want to take a look at Chipworks’ teardown of the A5 processor inside the iPad 2. There’s not much there for laypeople, though at over 120mm2 it’s more than twice the size of the A4 (53mm2), which, as you may imagine, allows them to fit more cores, more transistors, and a bigger GPU.
It’s still more or less “off the shelf,” and manufactured by Samsung at the moment (though it’s possible that will change with Apple’s recent partnership with TSMC), but that doesn’t stop it from being an effective hardware combination and one they have not failed to take advantage of. As we saw over the weekend, the performance gains are nothing to scoff at.
Keep an eye on the Chipworks blog for further updates.