Another report claims Apple's iPad 2 will sport a high-res display

Back-and-forth claims on the resolution of the display on Apple's forthcoming second-generation iPad continue, with a new report out of the Far East claiming it will be a 2048-by-1536-pixel screen.

Citing upstream component makers, Taiwan's DigiTimes reported Thursday that the iPad 2 will feature a resolution of 2048 by 1536, which would be quadruple the total pixels of the iPad. The current touchscreen tablet's 9.7-inch display has a pixel ratio of 1024 by 768.

For further evidence, the publication referred to previous reports that discovered icons labeled "@2x" in the iBooks application for iPad. For example, the current application's background image has a resolution of 768 by 400, while the "iPad@2x" file is 1536 by 800.

"The sources (added) that the larger resolution should provide the company's app developers more convenience, while all future applications will be able to run under any of Apple's machines including the 27-inch iMac," the report said.

It also noted that Apple should be able to ship more than 40 million iPads in 2011, and the company ordered between 1.6 million and 1.8 million devices in January. Initial iPad 2 shipments are expected to be between 400,000 and 600,000.

Though evidence exists suggesting a new high-resolution display for the second-generation iPad, one report this week claimed that such an upgrade is simply not in the cards for the 2011 model. John Gruber of Daring Fireball said on Wednesday that claims of a potential "Retina Display" in the next iPad are simply "too good to be true."

Gruber said the new iPad is expected to have a faster processor, more RAM, and better graphics performance. But he also believes it will have the same 1024-by-768-pixel display as on the current iPad.

Regardless of the resolution, as reported by AppleInsider, the iPad 2 is expected to have improved graphics capabilities with a fast dual-core SGX543 graphics processing unit included in a new, custom system-on-a-chip from Apple. The SGX543 architecture can support up to 16 cores, and the chip can push 35 million polygons per second at 200Mhz, and 1 billion pixels per second. It is also capable of handling Apple's OpenCL standard.