The Apple iPad Air 2 Review
by Joshua Ho on November 7, 2014 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Apple
- Mobile
- iOS
- ipad Air 2
CPU Performance
Now that we’ve managed to take a good look at the changes between the A8 and A8X, we can get a good idea of what those differences translate to in some real world performance. While we’ve already seen pure CPU performance, such differences can be small when viewed from real applications. To this end, we use a few browser benchmarks and similar benchmarks. I definitely want to caution against comparing SoCs across platforms though, as rendering engines have a significant effect upon the performance of the device.
There's really not too much that needs to be said here, as the extra core and minor clock speed bump make for ridiculous amounts of performance. The A8X is class-leading here despite generally having fewer cores and lower clocks than the rest of the competition. However, in comparison to A8 we don't see a massive jump in performance. This seems to suggest that even a third core will invoke diminishing returns in general, although these changes mean that it's enough for the iPad Air 2 to be one of the fastest ARM-based devices on the market. One can see an odd regression in the Basemark OS II storage test, but this is likely to be production variances in NAND quality rather than anything notable.
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tipoo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Question, don't you have to divide the final FPS of the performance degradation test with the first run, to see how much it actually went down? Otherwise you're not looking at degradation so much as total performance still. Performance may have degraded, but if it's higher to start with it's probably still higher in the end relatively.tipoo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
ie, if one device starts with 100FPS and degrades 40%, and the other starts at 50 and degrades 10%, the degradation on the second one is lower but the first one will still show higher on that graph.JoshHo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
This is definitely true, and it's taken into account when writing the review. In this case the degradation wasn't large enough to change any conclusions on the matter.kenansadhu - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
That NVIDIA Shield tablet is looking more and more interesting for me. I hope it will get a discount this holiday seasonphoenix_rizzen - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Yeah, it certainly is. This looks like the proper upgrade for a 2012 Nexus 7 running Tegra3.lucam - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
What's up to Tegra 4..:)chizow - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Any plans to update these graphs with Nexus 9 results? Sorry if this is mentioned in the piece somewhere, I tend to skip around before sitting down to read them in their entirety, thanks!tipoo - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
They waited for the newer firmware on the Nexus 9 before finalizing results I believe.coldpower27 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
"The fact that Apple used A7 in the previous iPad Air means that on top of already being a serious step up in transistor count versus A8, compared to the iPad Air 1 the gap is even larger. A7 occupied 102mm2 and more than 1 billion transistors, so compared to Apple’s previous tablet Apple has come very close to doubling their transistor count within 1 generation. "Did you mean triple? As 3 Billion is well over doubling of 1 Billion.
Ryan Smith - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
Doubling is correct. A7 is over 1B. I suspect it's close to 1.5B.