The iPad Air 2 is starting to hit doorsteps for preorders today, and already, the benchmarks are blowing us away, with an early Geekmark score showing that the iPad Air 2 is the fastest, most powerful tablet out there. Period.

But that’s not the surprising thing about the iPad Air 2.

The most surprising thing about the iPad Air 2 is that it not only boasts, as rumored, 2GB of RAM. It’s that it’s a tri-core device.

Let us explain. While many Android devices boast quad-core, or even hexa-core chips, Apple tends to be conservative in the number of distinct cores it adds to its chips, for a simple reason: power management. The more cores you have, the more power they tend to slurp up.

This is actually true of RAM too. Apple has been criticized in the past for releasing iPhones and iPads with half the RAM of Android smartphones, but more RAM negatively impacts battery life.

That’s why Apple has traditionally been conservative about the number of cores they use in their devices, or the RAM they ship. Designing a tablet or smartphone is a balancing act between speed and battery life. Given the choice, Apple would rather use faster RAM than more RAM, 64-bit dual-core devices instead of 32-bit quad-core devices.

With the iPad Air 2, Apple obviously figured out the balance. Not only does it have the same 10-hour battery life the iPad has always had, but it boasts 2GB of RAM and a 1.5GHz tri-core processor.

And what does that mean practically? It means the iPad Air 2 is not only the fastest tablet in the world, smoking even Nvidia’s Tegra K1 Shield Tablet. It’s also over 60% faster than even the iPhone 6.

If you want a top-of-the-line iDevice with blistering fast speed, the iPad Air 2 is as good as it gets.

Source: Geekbench