The A9 delivers extremely good performance across all of the benchmarks (except 3D Mark Physics). A very impressive processor from Apple, as per usual.
I also like that they've moved from a 4 cluster GPU design to a 6 cluster GPU. They probably didn't do so earlier for power reasons; Apple seems to try to design its SoCs so allow for maximum sustained performance.
It seems like a pretty competently designed high performance general purpose computing core. Looks like Apple is on the road to becoming the only competitor to Intel for single thread performance now that AMD is way beyond useless and IBM is going thread crazy like Oracle.