The iPad Air 2 is starting to hit doorsteps for preorders today, and already, the benchmarks are blowing us away, with an early Geekmark score showing that the iPad Air 2 is the fastest, most powerful tablet out there. Period.
But that’s not the surprising thing about the iPad Air 2.
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.
This is actually true of RAM too. Apple has been criticized in the past for releasing iPhones and iPads with half the RAM of Android smartphones, but more RAM negatively impacts battery life.
That’s why Apple has traditionally been conservative about the number of cores they use in their devices, or the RAM they ship. Designing a tablet or smartphone is a balancing act between speed and battery life. Given the choice, Apple would rather use faster RAM than more RAM, 64-bit dual-core devices instead of 32-bit quad-core devices.
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, smoking even Nvidia’s Tegra K1 Shield Tablet. It’s also over 60% faster than even the iPhone 6.
If you want a top-of-the-line iDevice with blistering fast speed, the iPad Air 2 is as good as it gets.
Source: Geekbench
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
14 responses to “Secret hardware upgrades make the iPad Air 2 the fastest frickin’ tablet on the planet”
How is it faster than a Surface Pro 3?
Surface Pro 3 is a laptop masquerading as a tablet. It is much heavier, has a lower battery life. It has a X86 class CPU processor from Intel which is a power hog. And not to mention the cheapest Surface pro 3 is far more expensive than iPad air 2 base model.
The fact that a power sipping RISC architecture A8X can almost match Surface 3 pro ( in Geekbench ) will make Intel shake in its boots.
I have a Surface Pro 3 and an iPad mini and plan to buy an Air 2 on Friday. The Surface sits on my desk and does a fantastic job of powers three 21″ monitors (using a great Display link dock from Targus) and comes home with me every night. I take the mini into meetings and out of the office because its handy and light. Both are great and I expect the Air 2 will be as well but they don’t encroach on each other’s areas.
lol. the surface pro 3 is a tablet with a FAN.
Yes, they expect you to walk around with a fan.
This article has left me breathless! Must resist urge to order iPad Air 2.
lol,
nothing near Tab s, even the iPad air 3, it’s feature proofed.
Saying it to Fandroids : Nexus 9 is not the fastest, as we can see NVIDIA Tegra K1 is not the fastest.
…now if the would concentrate on the simple task of multi window!
What Tablet does multi window? The Samsung tablets, yes, but this is restricted to about ten choices and none of them are the ones I would want, like MS Word or Excel! Why is multi window always mentioned by Android fans when it’s a very poor feature. I am currently using an Air 2 watching a You Tube video whilst writing this. You forget that the App Store usually has an app for anything an Android tablet can do. There is even a quad browser where you can have 4 browsers open on an iPad screen. And as you are aware browser apps pretty much cover every possible usage, no restrictions like the Samsung.
I can see you have not have a note pro 12″ in your hands. Don’t Worry Lack Of Knowledge Is Only For fanboys
I sold my note pro 12. I came to the conclusion if you are going to carry a 12 inch tablet around for work you might as well carry a computer. I can do anything productive far quicker on the laptop than I can on the Pro 12.
Would’ve been nice to see these specs in the 6Plus to keep up with the 1080 display, although I am quite happy that Apple has decided to give the iPad a much needed spec bump to distinguish itself from the iPhone line. I’m guessing this was a preemptive move to help stave off some of the 6Plus influenced cannibalization of the iPad line.
While I love Apple devices, I think this article is misleading and technically incorrect on virtually all of its points. Perhaps the author is not an engineer and thinks its a simple numbers game? For example, often there are no more chip modules for 1 and 2 gigs of ram, so there isn’t going to be much more power usage. Even with more modules you’ll save maybe 10 minutes of battery power as a difference (out of 10 hours of usage). The extra cores don’t always have to be on, on the ARM architecture they standby in a low power mode until needed. So a lot of the 8-core Android phones that were released earlier this year, don’t always have them on and neither do both ARM cores on your iPad stay on. They only power on and throttle on when needed. 64 bit cores are not faster than 32 bit cores (nor twice as fast as the author implies), the main difference is really that they can accept more than 4 gigs of ram. Also to preempt contrary arguments – instruction sets are independent of how many bits they have. Also processors are usually made to be good at different things. The Tegra K1 has exceptional graphics, running Riptide GP2 side by side demonstrates this. This doesn’t mean it has a faster or slower processor, just that it’s optimized for gaming. The iPad cores are exceptionally power saving and are well optimized for iOS tasks in general. The MediaTek cores are designed to be cheap and inexpensive to produce so you can get a mid-range IPS display handset for less than $150. There’s no need to be dishonest about technology. But there is a need to be accurate and factual and to provide context.
You are also technically incorrect.
The move to 64 bit had nothing to do with ram. it had to do with access to the ARMv8 instruction set…
Android will still be struggling to get 64 bit working beyond the default settings as building a device is like herding cats. Even the newest nexus is just 32 bit, and android L is supposed to be a 64 bit OS. lol!