New iPad Air 2 review:
And Apple has taken some things away. Our calipers tell us that’s 1.2 mm of thickness gone. The new iPad is now 6.3 mm thick, against 7.5 mm for last year's iPad Air.
Replacing the Apple A7 processor is this year’s new chip, the Apple A8 that features in the iPhone 6. Only this time it’s known as the A8X, with unspecified improvements in its performance.
What we do now know however is that the Air 2 packs 2 GB of memory, against 1 GB that’s been installed in every iPad since the iPad with Retina display – aka, ‘the iPad 3’.
Apple claims this processor is 40 percent faster, with graphics 2.5 times better than found in the Apple A7 chip in the first iPad Air.
We put the chip through some tests of raw speed using the Geekbench 3 benchmark tool. With a single core from its three-core architecture, it scored 1816 points; and multi-core mode it scored 4523 points. That’s up on the 1468 and 2658 results from last year’s model.
Graphics performance is harder to put a number to at the moment. GFXBench does a good job of showing framerates with some varied simulated games, but a temporary software issue means the final results are not displayed on screen. We’ll update this when a new build that fixes this is released through the App Store soon.