Intrinsity does not "create customized ARM chips", they optimize existing designs. There's been nothing impressive so far in Apple's chips, they're pretty standard design though thought to have been optimized by Intrinsity's folks.
Innovative custom designs were expected from the PA Semi acquisition. Apparently did not pan out, since it's been three years and there isn't much to show for it.
The iPad 2 has a smaller, lower resolution display than the other tablets in those charts. Once you compensate for that it still has an advantage, but barely. It hardly leaves the other tablets "in the dust".
You appear to be claiming that this is a demonstration of how much better Apple's custom ARM chips are, when it's just a better GPU in the core, just like Samsung's Hummingbirds in the Galaxy and Nexus S used the next GPU up compared with the iPhone 4. They're all PowerVRs. It's about as technically impressive as us both buying a laptop from Dell and me buying a laptop with a better GPU than yours.
I suppose you could give Apple 10% credit seeing how they bought that much of the company that makes them (again, after starting to use their products) but then Intel should get even more credit, because they've owned more, for longer.
There's two sides to this argument and you appear to have missed the important half. Anyone can slap a better GPU on and get better framerates. Not just anyone can slap on "the next GPU up" and still beat you in battery life.
Everything I've ever read about Apple's supposed optimizations is that they have to do with power efficiency.
At least for the A4/Hummingbird, Intrinsity optimised the existing Cortex-A8 design for Samsung and before Apple bought them, so you disagree based on faulty facts.
SAMSUNG and Intrinsity Jointly Develop the World's Fastest ARM® Cortex™-A8 Processor Based Mobile Core
"Seoul, Korea, Austin, Texas - July 27, 2009 : Samsung and Intrinsity today jointly announced the industry's fastest mobile processor core implementation of the dual-issue ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor architecture in 45 nanometer (nm) Low Power (LP), low leakage process technology. This Cortex-A8 implementation, code-named Hummingbird, delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz. The Hummingbird comes with 32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache, the size of which can be customized, and an ARM® NEON™ multi-media extension. Performance and power consumption of the Hummingbird have been validated in silicon. Samsung is currently developing standard mobile SoC products using this new core."
At least for the A4/Hummingbird, Intrinsity optimised the existing Cortex-A8 design for Samsung and before Apple bought them, so you disagree based on faulty facts.
Your going to have tell me what you think is wrong, because I can't read minds. I can't see any problem, but I'll rephrase to see if it's just the sentence structure that's confusing you:
Samsung worked with a company called Intrinsity.
They took the Cortex-A8 design, and Intrinsity made it a bit more power efficient.
Samsung sells these chips, and uses them in their devices.
They also sell them to Apple.
Apple gets Samsung to put Apple logos on them, and refers to them as the A4.
Apple bought the company called Intrinsity after all the work on the A4 was finished, nothing they've done in the pay of Apple has any impact on the A4 or Hummingbird core.
I responded to someone claiming that Intrinsity customised the chips for Apple. This isn't true. I linked to a press release that shows this.
