Benchmarks iPad Pro show details and performance of A9X dual-core

Now that the Apple iPad Pro is available, the first benchmarks are popping up. They provide insight into the structure and performance of the new A9X soc. With two cores at 2.26GHz and 4GB lpddr4 memory, the soc seems to set scores that can compete with laptop processors from Intel.

Apple itself provides virtually no information about the construction of the A9X soc. Anandtech has managed to find out a number of features of the chip using software. It turns out that the soc only has two Twister cores, with a clock speed of 2.26GHz. That is striking, since Apple uses an A8X soc with three cores in the iPad Air 2.

There is 4GB lpddr4 memory and the memory bus is 128 bits wide. That’s double the bus in the A9-soc used in the iPhone 6s and 6s plus. It results in a memory bandwidth of 51.2GB/s. It is unknown who produces the A9X; the soc is made using TSMC’s 16nm finfet process or Samsung’s 14nm finfet process. Both manufacturers supply the A9-soc to Apple for the iPhones.

It is not yet clear which GPU is used in the A9X soc. According to Anandtech, it is likely to be a PowerVR Series7 design with ten clusters. The A9 has such a GPU with six clusters. A picture of the die will have to show how exactly the gpu is put together. Benchmarks show that the graphics performance compared to the A9 has almost doubled. This could be due to more clusters or higher clock speeds.

Benchmark performed by Anandtech

Results of the A9X soc can also be seen on Geekbench. There, the chip can also be compared to the A9 of the latest iPhones. It can be seen that the soc in the iPad Pro scores considerably higher in all areas and that memory performance has almost doubled.

With a single-core score of 3242 and multicore score of 5521, the A9X manages to hold its own against the Intel Core i5-6300U, a dual-core CPU with four threads from the Skylake generation, which is used in the Surface Pro 4, among others. can be found. The Intel CPU scores successively 3521 and 6780 points. Ars Technica has also pitted the iPad Pro against various MacBooks. The MacBook with Core M CPU is beaten on all fronts.

Benchmark performed by Ars Technica