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Apple unveiled its brand new iPad tablet line-up last week, revealing a new iPad Air featuring an even thinner chassis, TouchID login, plus a new 20nm A8X processor. Benchmarks and specs are thin on the ground, but Apple promises a 40 per cent boost to CPU power and a whopping 2.5x increase to graphics power - a potent combination. Meanwhile, 24 hours earlier, Google had debuted its new Nexus 9 tablet - powered by a new 64-bit Tegra K1 processor. Apple has traditionally dominated the mobile specs war, but this time it faces its sternest challenge yet.At this point in time the Nexus 9 isn't available, but we know a lot about the new Google tablet's capabilities thanks to our existing knowledge of the Tegra K1's formidable GPU component and some preliminary CPU benchmarks. Against that, an iPad Air 2 arrived at the office this morning, so we can run some initial benchmarks to give us some idea of how potent Apple's new A8X processor actually is. Out of the box, the big surprise with the new iPad Air is that the A8X has a tri-core CPU set-up, with three of its custom Cyclone cores operating at 1.5GHz.
But more important than the specs and the benchmarks are the possibilities these new technologies offer to game-makers. Regular Digital Foundry readers will know that the GPU component of Tegra K1 brings mobile gaming very close to the standards established by the graphics hardware found in Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Initial benchmark results suggest the GPU component in the iPad Air 2 is capable of handing in similar overall performance.
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