New Apple iPad Air equipped with 4 GB of RAM

Benchmarks leaked over the weekend gave us an insight into the performance of the A14 Bionic chip in the soon-to-launch iPad Air, and also revealed another tidbit: Apple’s newest tablet has 4GB of RAM.

That’s 1GB more than the previous generation iPad Air that had an A12 Bionic processor, but less RAM than is available in iPad Pro models. All Apple 2020 ‌iPad Pro‌ models have 6GB of RAM.

With the jump in RAM and the impressive performance of the A14 chip, the new iPad Air is slightly faster than the previous generation model, plus it has the full-screen design with the Touch ID Home button, a first for Apple.

The leaked A14 ‌iPad‌ Air Geekbench result featured a single-core score of 1583 and a multi-core score of 4198, a solid improvement over the single-core score of 1112 and a multi-core score of 2832 obtained by the third generation. ‌IPad‌ Air with A12 Bionic.

In particular, the benchmarking results suggest that other devices equipped with the A14 chip, such as Apple’s iPhone 12 line, will also see notable speed improvements. The A14 is a step up in terms of performance and efficiency because it is Apple’s first chip built in a smaller 5-nanometer process. Reduced node sizes result in higher power chips that use less power to increase battery life and speed. The 5-nanometer A-series chips are also expected to be used in upcoming Macs with Apple Silicon, although Macs may use an improved A14X variant that is even faster.

Apple plans to launch the new ‌iPad‌ Air with A14 chip sometime in October, although a release date has not been announced. It’s reasonable to expect the new ‌iPad‌ Air to come after the debut of the new ‌iPhone 12‌ models because the tablet contains new technology (the A14 chip) that Apple may not want to thoroughly inspect before the debut of its flagship iPhone line, despite of the reference leak.