Its pretty incredible, Apple just last year had to develop a special "X" chip with quad core graphics for the iPads Retina Display. Now the regular old A7 that is also in the iPhone 5s is able to double the A6X performance. To me thats remarkable.
Even more remarkable, the A7 in iPad Air is significantly more powerful than the chip that shipped in 2010 Macbook Airs. Think about that. In just a few years, we now have something more powerful, with a Retina Display and significantly more powerful graphics, in something that weighs only 1 lb has 10 hour batt life and costs half the price of what that MBA cost in 2010.
I find the exponential trajectory of ARM performance in the last few years to be staggering. Anyone thinking Apple has any intentions of putting Intel inside an iPad is not looking to the future. Yes, Intel processors are still much faster, and they are making great strides with energy consumption. But given the exponential rate of ARM performance, how long until ARM eventually catches up? Especially in the crucial performance-per-watt metric so important to these lightweight mobile devices. It seems like graphics performance is already well on its way to surpassing Intels integrated GPU efforts.