If you’ve just got yourself a shiny new iPad 2 and can’t stop telling everyone how awesome it is, well now you’ve got something else to add to that list, as according to TUAW today, benchmark tests have revealed that iMovie actually runs faster on an iPad 2 than on most Macs. The tests, which were conducted by AppAdvice, put iMovie for iOS running on the iPad 2, with its dual-core A5, up against iMovie for Mac OS X running on several different Macs. To carry out the comparison, AppAdvice ran three tests on all the Macs at an Apple Store, except for the Mac mini.
For the first test, which was copying a test video shot on a fourth-gen iPod touch to either an iPad 2 or a Mac, TUAW reports that the iPad 2 came out miles ahead, taking just 25.5 seconds to copy the files, compared to 56.5 seconds for the Mac Pro.
The second test involved encoding an unedited movie to 720p, and again, the iPad 2 came out on top, encoding the file in 1 minute and 56 seconds, whereas the fastest Mac in the test, the Mac Pro, took 2 minutes and 15 seconds. The fastest laptop, the MacBook Pro, took 2 minutes and 20 seconds.
For the third and final test, the iPad 2 had to handle adding a title overlay, background music, and images to open and close the movie. This was the only test where the iPad 2 failed to beat the Macs, taking 2 minutes and 5 seconds to render the video in contrast to the 1 minute and 48 seconds of the MacBook Pro.
While these results are certainly an impressive indication of just what the A5 chip can do for the iPad 2, as TUAW points out, the iOS version of iMovie doesn’t have the comprehensive editing features of the Mac version, and the video was shot on an iPod touch, with a similar chipset to the iPad 2, so was possibly better suited to the iPad 2. All that aside, some pretty cool figures for iPad 2 owners to pore over!
Source:TUAW iMovie on iPad 2 beats most Macs in benchmarks
