The fourth-gen iPad Air went official last month, flaunting a new design language, more firepower under the hood and refreshing new color options. Apple talked a lot about the capabilities of the A14 Bionic processor powering the tablet, claiming that it offers a 40% boost in raw processing power compared to the A12 Bionic and a 30% improvement in the graphics department. Now, the first synthetic benchmark of the iPad Air 4 has allegedly appeared online and it reveals that Apple has packed 4GB RAM inside the iPad Air 4 ticking alongside the A14 Bionic processor.
The Geekbench listing, which was first spotted by leakster Ice Universe and later confirmed by reliable Apple leakster L0vetodream, shows the device posting some impressive results on the Geekbench 5.0 benchmarking platform. The listing also suggests that the A14 Bionic has six cores and has a base clock speed of 2.99GHz. Talking about the actual synthetic benchmark scores, the iPad Air put up a single-core score of 1583, and while the multi-core tally stood at 4198.
For comparison, the A12 Bionic chip powering the third-gen iPad Air reached a single-core tally of 1116 on Geekbench v5.0 and 2758 on the multi-core test. Now, that’s a massive performance gain in both single-core and multi-core capabilities. In fact, the single-core tally of the A14 Bionic-powered iPad Air 4 (1583) is higher than the single-core Geekbench v5.0 score (1118) of the 11-inch iPad Pro that relies on the A12Z Bionic processor and went official earlier this year.
In separate news, Apple VP of product marketing Bob Borchers, mentioned that the side-mounted fingerprint sensor on the 4th Gen iPad Air was an ‘an incredible feat of engineering.’ Speaking alongside Apple VP of hardware engineering John Ternus on an episode of the iJustine and Jenna Ezarik podcast Same Brain, Borchers dished out details on how Apple side the fingerprint sensor and how it was an evolution of existing technology (Touch ID). While the Apple executive speaks highly of the side fingerprint sensor, Samsung and rival brands have been shipping Android tablets and smartphones equipped with such a design for a few years now.