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A short time ago, we highlighted a new benchmark appearing to show an iPad Air 2 device carrying an A8X chip with a triple-core 1.5 GHz processor and 2 GB of RAM.

While we mentioned that the enhanced specs have led to huge performance gains compared to the A8 chip found in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Primate Labs has now published a nice pair of charts showing just how dramatic this improvement really is, making the iPad Air 2 far and away the fastest iOS device ever.

The most striking improvement comes in the multi-score benchmarks, where the A8X with its three cores of processing power blows away the dual-core A8 found in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. As a result, the iPad Air 2 registers over 55 percent faster than the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in the multi-core benchmark. Comparing iPad to iPad, the A8X in the iPad Air 2 measures 68 percent faster than the A7 in last year's iPad Air according to the multi-core benchmark.

ipad_air_2_geekbench_multi.jpg

The iPad Air 2 also sets new high scores in the single-core benchmarks thanks to the 1.5 GHz cores in the A8X, with much of the nearly 13 percent gain over the A8 coming from the 100 MHz speed improvement compared the 1.4 GHz cores found in the iPhone and 6 Plus. The iPad Air 2 of course also compares favorably to the original iPad Air, with single core scores up 23 percent.

ipad_air_2_geekbench_single.jpg


Article Link: iPad Air 2 Up to 55% Faster Than iPhone 6, Up to 68% Faster Than iPad Air
 
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Honestly, at this point, what does one do with this power? Makes me wonder if it's going to be used in some yet to be announced products.
 
Holy crap. Looks like I'm taking a trip to the Apple Store to test this BEAST out.

I'm already playing console quality games (Modern Combat 5, Blitz Brigade). I can't even fathom gaming in 1-2 years once Swift, Metal, and these specs get taking full advantage of!
 
Honestly, at this point, what does one do with this power? Makes me wonder if it's going to be used in some yet to be announced products.

CAD (Computer art design) etc, they showcased some really powerful applications running in real time on the iPad Air 2 at the event, it was amazing, this thing is a total beast
 
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What impresses me more than raw performance is the _improvements_ to mobile performance year to year.

Computers do not get THIS much faster every year. We're lucky to see 3-8% increases.

If you extrapolate just a few years ahead, the future of mobile will unlock completely unprecedented possibilities. That's pretty neat. I honestly don't yet know how all this power can be used yet, but that's an interesting problem to have.

Not to mention we have WebGL on mobile, Metal. Unity publishes to HTML5 + WebGL as well as iOS / Metal.
 
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Can't wait for the A9 in the iPhone 6s! This confirms it will be a significant step up from the 6 like the (s) models usually are.
 
New device

This kind of crunching power in an iPad seems useless for now and probably for a while.

Are they just ramping up their ARM CPUs to the point where they can compete with the low end of Intel's offering? The objective could be to reach a point where an Macbook with an ARM CPU running OS X would be feasible...
 
I am baffled as to how they're managing this performance with the same battery life and a significantly smaller battery (down from 32.4 Wh to 27.3 Wh).
 
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