Apple's iPad Air 2 contains a new chip called the A8X, an SoC that's faster than the A7 in the original iPad Air or the iPad Mini 2 and 3 and the A8 in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Apple would only say that the chip's CPU is about 40 percent faster than the A7 and that it has a GPU that's 2.5 times faster.
We haven't gotten our hands on an iPad Air 2 review unit yet, so we haven't been able to test out these claims. A test from Primate Labs' Geekbench Results Browser sheds an interesting light on the subject, though: the result in question shows a three-core processor with 2GB of RAM, double the memory of any previous iOS device. Assuming the scores are accurate, the A8X could outdo the A7 in some tasks by as much as 66 percent.
Primate Labs' John Poole seems fairly confident in the results' authenticity, telling us that "if [the result is spoofed], it's the best spoof I've ever seen." They do seem suspiciously high to us at this point—Apple's broad percentage claims have generally tracked pretty well with Geekbench scores in the past. If they're accurate, the iPad Air 2 is getting a much bigger generation-to-generation performance boost than the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus did.
In the past, Apple has been content to keep the same basic CPUs in both iPhones and iPads. The A5, A5X, A6, and A6X were all dual-core CPUs, and the iPad versions focused mostly on increasing GPU performance rather than CPU performance. We'll know more about the A8X and its performance when we have hardware in hand.
Update: The early review embargoes have lifted, and it looks like the Geekbench results above are genuine. The A8X has a three-core CPU based on the same CPU architecture as the standard dual-core A8, and the new tablet comes with 2GB of RAM.
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