I'll start by saying I don't care for Sony. I just want that to be clear. But at the very least this is an impressive piece of Hardware, even if it might fail to win over gamers.[citation][nom]dalethepcman[/nom]So it has twice the video power of an ipad2, but 1/4 the ram.[/citation]We don't know clock speeds, so we can't say that for certain. But it does have the same type of CPU and twice as many cores, and the same GPU again with twice as many cores. So you could guesstimate that it has at least double the CPU *AND* GPU power - and that assumes it isn't operating at higher clockspeeds. Might be even more.
As for memory, you misread the article. It has the same amount (512MB) of system memory, and it is probably faster DDR3 instead of the iPad 2's 1066 DDR2. I'd guess 1333 at least. It ALSO has an ADDITIONAL 128MB of dedicated video memory. This memory is very likely clocked even higher than main memory, and/or has a wider bus. It could even be using GDDR5 like modern mobile graphics. Regardless it will have a lot more bandwidth than main memory.[citation][nom]dalethepcman[/nom]Not really impressive enough considering the Tegra 3 will have twice the gpu muscle and the same cpu.[/citation]We'll see. I've seen benchmarks showing a fast clocked single core SGX540 beating a Tegra 2. An SGX540 - old tech. This is a SGX543MP4+, I'm certain you know that's 4 cores at an unknown clockspeed, with 128MB of dedicated (and probably very fast) memory. I wouldn't count it out just yet.
Last I heard Tegra 3 was on the 40nm node, and was "5 times faster" than Tegra 2. That would probably put it on par with Sony's solution. More importantly, even if Tegra 3 is faster, maybe it was too far on the horizon. Sony couldn't wait any longer, from their point of view they had to stop waiting and start designing, refining, and building hardware.