iPad Air 2 faster than new iPad Mini 4

Along with the latest iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, new Apple Watch options, a revamped Apple TV and an iPad Pro, Apple unveiled iPad Mini 4 at the much awaited event held at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.

"We've taken the power and performance of iPad Air 2, and built it into an even smaller, mini enclosure," said Apple marketing Senior Vice President Phil Schiller, IBTimes reports.

However, a new research from Ars Technica shows that's not entirely true. The report began by stating:

“The new tablet uses a dual-core Apple A8 chip rather than the faster tri-core A8X in the iPad Air 2, and we knew that the new tablet supported iOS 9's new Split View multitasking mode”

Ars Technica employed the Geekbench 3, a cross-platform processor benchmark, and ran some tests. The results confirmed that “the tablet uses a 1.5GHz Apple A8 with 2GB of RAM, which is faster than both the 1.4GHz A8 in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and the 1.3GHz A7 in the iPad Mini 2 and Mini 3.”

According to the results, on overall multicore performance, the iPad Mini 4 scored 3,121, lagging behind the Air 2, which scored 4,542 on the same metric. But even on single core performance, the Mini 4 scored 1,716, compared to the Air 2's score of 1,831. This shows that Air 2 has the extra edge on both single core and multi core performance.

The report added, “Having a whole extra CPU core makes the 1.5GHz A8X in the iPad Air 2 about 50% faster than the Mini 4, but we're still looking at a 20-or-so percent improvement over the old Mini 2 and Mini 3.”