With the iPad mini 2 Retina now out in certain regions, benchmarking tests have revealed that it’s only slightly slower than its big brother the iPad Air.
The iPad mini 2 Retina, or iPad mini with Retina display to give it its official title, is out now in the US and other non-UK territories. It sports the same design as the first iPad mini, but comes with a 7.9-inch Retina display and an A7 processor.
Sure enough, some bright bods have already analysed the iPad mini 2 Retina to establish what it’s capable of.
As mentioned, we already knew that the iPad mini 2 Retina runs on the same A7 dual-core 64-bit processor as can be found in both the iPhone 5S and the iPad Air. What we didn’t know was how fast it would be clocked - until now.
Early benchmarks from the likes of Geekbench appear to show that the iPad mini 2 Retina’s processor is clocked at 1.3GHz. That’s the same as the iPhone 5S and just 100MHz slower than iPad Air.
The lower clock speed could be down to Apple wanting to keep its smallest tablet cool, or just to keep that strong battery life up. Either way, the difference in performance between the company’s two main tablets should be negligible, and almost certainly impossible to detect in general usage - unless Apple has altered the way the smaller device behaves under load for the above reasons.
These test also show that the iPad mini 2 Retina is around five times more powerful than the original iPad mini, which is arguably the most important fact of all.
UK customers will be able to ascertain this for themselves later in November.
Read More: iPad mini 2 with Retina display - Missing features
Via: TechCrunch
