Apple iPad Air 2 has a triple-core processor, 2GB RAM: Benchmark tests
APPLE ADDS A THIRD CPU CORE IN THE A8XThis additional core explains a lot about the 1 billion increase in transistors, and it further cements the point about the iPad Air being in a whole different league in terms of productivity when compared to the iPhone. Apple unveiled the iPad Air 2, claiming the world’s thinnest tablet title, but the second generation of the airy tablet also packs some serious punch coming with the Apple A8X system chip.
This remarkable achievement, however, did not reveal much about the inner workings of the Apple A8X: it’s most likely a 20nm chip, but what about its CPU and GPU? The iPad Air 2 is yet to arrive in stores, but some folks have gotten an early look at it and ran it through benchmarks. This border was blurred last year when both the iPhone and the iPad used largely the same Apple A7 chip, while this year Apple is eager to make a more clear distinction between the two. As per two different benchmarking websites, the Apple A8X chip that powers the new iPad Air 2 with LTE, has a triple-core processor. At the time of introducing the new iPad Air, apple just said that the A8X chip was 40% faster than the A7 processor found in the first iPad Air and that the integrated graphics processing of A8X was 2.5 times faster than the A7 chip. Apple does not reveal detailed hardware specifications for its devices and specifics are only uncovered by third party benchmarking websites and apps.
The recently announced iPad Air 2 sports much more powerful hardware compared to the new iPhone models, according to benchmark test scores.
The results are in and so are some very interesting revelations: Geekbench reports that the iPad Air 2 comes with a very unorthodox tri-core CPU and each core gets a bump in nominal clock speed from 1.4GHz in the A8 to 1.5GHz in the A8X. The iPad Air 2 has also got 2GB of RAM, double the amount of memory on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and that’s important for multitasking. It’s worth pointing out that the A8 chip that powers the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus has a dual-core processor. So far, we only knew that Apple has ramped up the number of transistors in the A8X to a whopping 3 billion, up from 2 billion in the A8 and 1 billion in the A7. Interestingly, judging purely by the GeekBench score, the iPad Air 2 is faster than the 2011 MacBook Air (11-inch) as pointed by John Gruber of Daring Fireball.
