iPad Pro A9X had huge potential for performance improvement?

[garyleecn]

so if we look at the speaker chamber (or whatever it's called), if apple fill that with battery, the sound quality would be at least on par with air2/mini4, but a huge gain of battery capacity.
and actually 10-hour battery is pretty enough for most use cases, so apple could use those extra battery capacity to power an extra (or two?) cores in A9X, thus maybe 1.5x or even 2x of current A9X performance.

maybe apple is saving this for later, pro2?

 

[Atomic Walrus]

Device is thermally constrained. Multicore score < 2x single core indicates throttling. Could be artificial TDP, but I doubt it. This is why the 3rd core of A8X was cut for A9X; Adding cores won't make much, if any difference in this situation.

 

[ZBoater]

No. Not a heavier Pro.

 

[jonstatt1]

It is interesting...where Samsung have gone more and more towards "many" cores with the latest phones using the Exynos Octacore CPUs (4 cores of the CPU at 2.1GHz), and Apple seemingly moving backwards with dual cores.

I haven't played with an Exynos, but I do recall on my quad core Snapdragon on the Note 4, that if I ran a benchmark over and over...it would get slower and slower and slower radically due to heat throttling. Whereas on the iPhone 6S Plus (A9) it seems to hold steady. So it can give a sustained and consistent performance compared to some of the higher core CPUs out there

 

[nylon]

Batteries are heavy, obviously weight was the limiting factor.

 

[TurboPGT!]

Device is thermally constrained.

This is the answer.
There's no limit to the class of chip and battery Apple can develop down the road, but there are limits to how many chips could be running in tandem.