Snippet: Regarding the iPad mini 4’s Performance ☇

Although not as powerful as the iPad Air 2, Ars Technica’s Andrew Cunningham finds it performs quite well, especially when pitted against prior iPad minis:

To shed some light on the subject, we fired up Geekbench 3 and ran some tests. We can confirm 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.

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. That extra RAM will be good for more than just Split View multitasking, too—2GB iDevices need to eject things from memory less often, cutting down on the amount of tab reloading that Safari does and generally reducing wait times when switching between different tabs and apps.