Over the past weekend, 9to5Mac spotted that Apple had updated the tech specs for the latest iPad Air to state that the M2 chip inside the Air has 9 cores of GPU. Apple originally stated that the chip inside that tablet had 10 cores of GPU in its press release; however, in the Apple Event video, the company just said that the tablet featured that chip without going into any specific details on the number of CPU/GPU cores.
Up until now, there have been two variants of the M2 chip:
- One with 8 cores of CPU and 8 cores of GPU, which appears in the base configuration of the 13-inch MacBook Air (M2, 2022)
- One with 8 cores of CPU and 10 cores of GPU, which appears in the following products that Apple introduced:
- higher-end configurations of the 13-inch MacBook Air (M2, 2022)
- 15-inch MacBook Air (M2, 2023)
- 13-inch MacBook Pro (M2, 2022)
- Mac mini (M2, 2023)
- 11-inch iPad Pro (4th generation, 2022)
- 12.9-inch iPad Pro (6th generation, 2022)
- Vision Pro (2024)
With the recent update in the tech specs page, it now appears that the new iPad Air isn’t using the same variant of the M2 chip found in the previous generation iPad Pro, but rather, it uses a binned version of that chip. So apparently, there’s now a third variant of the M2 chip (9-core GPU) that makes its debut on the new iPad Air.
There seemed to be a mix-up on the specs for the iPad Air’s M2 chip, but now an Apple spokesperson has confirmed this update to 9to5Mac. However, despite this “downgrade”, they still claim that the performance benchmarks remain accurate and were based on a 9-core GPU.
For what it’s worth, the drop in the GPU core count won’t be noticeable for the average Joe who’s going to do casual tasks on the iPad Air as the M2 chip is more than capable enough to do anything you want on an iPad. Only time will tell if we’ll see even more “pro” software features in the next version of iPadOS that will take full advantage of that chip at this year’s WWDC.
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