Ever since the recent release of the iPad Pro, there have been many positive remarks about Apple’s newest tablet. However, in order to produce a performance hungry tablet like the iPad Pro, the CPU has be more powerful than any other Apple mobile chips. Which is why Apple introduced the A9X as its processor, and interestingly, there hasn’t been many reviews about the chip that powers Apple’s biggest tablet; until now.
Apple’s most powerful mobile processor has been under the microscope of Anandtech and Chipworks. They took a closer look on the A9X and found plenty of interesting features that lie inside the brain of the iPad Pro. For one, the A9x only has two cores, which comes as a surprise since its predecessor, the A8X, had three cores. It doesn’t end there either: the A9X is missing an L3 cache, which is usually needed for fast relaying of instructions to the CPU.
The absence of a third core and cache may be compensated by the overwhelming amount of bandwidth: 51GB/s and 12 graphics cores, which are able to even outperform certain desktop-grade CPUs. One contributing factor to the performance of the A9X is probably due to the increase in RAM: the A9X has a 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, while the A8X has 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM.
Besides the increase in bandwidth and graphics core, the clock speed of Apple’s most powerful mobile processor has also taken a giant leap. In comparison, the A8X has a clock speed of 1.5 GHz; the A9X has 2.26 GHz. All of the features inside the A9X chip was made by Apple with the iPad Pro in mind. So far, it’s living up to Apple’s standards.
More information on Apple’s A9X chip can be found on AnandTech’s website.
(Source: AnandTech)
