With shipments of the iPad Air 2 expected to reach their new owners within this week, people are waiting to see real-life performance reviews of Apple's flagship tablet. But benchmark reports are coming in already, all confirming the iPad Air 2 to be the fastest and most powerful tablet there is to date.
Chelito Carasig, tech reporter for The Morning News, writes that benchmark tests show the iPad Air 2 to be "way ahead of other devices in the chart... and with this performance leap, the A8X chip may have a triple core processor."
Carasig explains that "a few days before Apple introduced the iPad Air 2 during its October 16 event, photos of purported leaked parts intended for said device were uploaded to the net and one of these is a picture showing the logic board with a processor and the device's RAM on it. Upon closer inspection, the said processor turned out to be the A8X chip which now powers the iPad Air 2 and 2GB of RAM."
John Brownlee of Cult of Mac agrees, saying that "the benchmarks are blowing us away, with an early Geekmark score showing that the iPar Air 2 is the fastest, most powerful tablet out there. Period."
That's really not the most surprising thing about the iPad Air 2, Brownlee says. "The most surprising thing about the iPad Air 2 is that it not only boasts, as rumored, 2GB of RAM. It's that it's a tri-core device."
"Let us explain. While many Android devices boast quad-core, or even hexa-core chips, Apple tends to be conservative in the number of distinct cores it adds to its chips, for a simple reason: power management. The more cores you have, the more power they tend to slurp up," Brownlee writes.
"With the iPad Air 2, Apple obviously figured out the balance. Not only does it have the same 10-hour battery life the iPad has always had, but it boasts 2GB of RAM and a 1.5GHz tri-core processor. And what does that mean practically? It means the iPad Air 2 is not only the fastest tablet in the world," he adds.
"The A8X's tri-core 64-bit Cyclone CPU is about 20% faster than the A7's dual-core CPU in single-threaded tasks - and almost twice as fast in multi-threaded tasks. The tri-core CPU, incidentally, is clocked at just 1.5GHz (the Snapdragon 805, by comparison, is usually clocked somewhere between 2.5 and 2.7GHz)," writes Sebastian Anthony of ExtremeTech.