The iPad 2 can handle an estimated 1.5 to 1.65 gigaflops — billions of mathematical operations measured with the Linpack standard — per second, making it 10 times faster than the original iPad. This also makes it faster than any computer or supercomputer before 1994.
More facts about computers and iPads:
- The fastest computers in the world can handle about 2.5 petaflops, or about 2,500 trillion calculations per second. As of 2011, the fastest computer in the world was the Tianhe-1A supercomputer, located in China.
- An estimated 500,000 iPad 2s per day were sold in the first few days of its release — 70 percent of which were sold to new buyers.
- The United States owns more than half of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. By comparison, the country with the next greatest share of supercomputers is the United Kingdom, which owns about 7 percent; then France, which owns about 5 percent.