Ars Technica is quite possibly the most respected technology website there is. Their exhaustive review of the iPad 2 is a must read for anyone who is technically minded, and for those that have yet to hold an iPad 2 for themselves. Here's a small sample to give you a flavour of the level of detail that Ars always bring to their hardware reviews.

As we saw in the previous benchmarks, the iPad 2 has a significant increase in floating point performance vs. its predecessor. This was really pounded home by the LINPACK tests which showed the iPad 2 besting its predecessor with a 292% (~3x) improvement. We ran this rest on the Motorola Xoom running Android 3.0 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab running 2.2. The iPad 2 shows a surprising 336% improvement over the Motorola Xoom on its NIVIDIA Tegra 2 platform and a 724% increase over the Samsung Galaxy Tab’s 1GHz “Hummingbird ARM” processor.

This substantial speed increase is wonderful news for iPad artists and musicians. It should lead to more fluid simulation of real instruments and physical media.

It's well worth reading all 7 pages.