Apple iPad Air 2 Tablet Review

Apple's CPUs often sound very underpowered on paper. Snapdragon are releasing octa-core processors clocked well over 2GHz, while the iPad Air 2 has a humble triple-core A8X processor at 1.5GHz. Well do not be fooled – it is an incredible performer.

In everyday terms, the iPad performed just as you would expect it to – flawlessly. iOS 8 is incredibly responsive, and we encountered no lag when switching between multiple apps or opening new ones.

Games also play very well, and look beautiful on the improved display. For normal use and everyday tasks, it is hard to find a better performer than this.

This power certainly translates to the benchmarks. In Geekbench 3, it scored 1817 for single-core performance, and a whopping 4437 for multi-core performance. This wipes the floor with the Google Nexus 9, which scored 1962 and 3373, respectively.

In 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, the iPad scored 21348. This is actually behind the 24473 of the Nexus 9 – but the Kepler GPU architecture clearly helps the Nexus here.

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