Apple quietly announced the new generation iPad mini (2024) via a newsroom post on Tuesday. The company did not wait for another event to announce this updated product. The new iPad mini (2024) is the most affordable product from Apple that supports Apple Intelligence (which is yet to roll out).
The first set of iPad mini orders is all set to arrive next week, on October 23. However, for benchmark enthusiasts, the device has made its way to the Geekbench listing. The results confirm that the new iPad mini (2024) comes with more RAM and also upgraded performance, thanks to the binned A17 Pro chipset.
In the Geekbench listing, the iPad mini (2024) was spotted with an identifier iPad 16,2 and J411AP motherboard. According to the Apple database, the identifier iPad 16,2 is confirmed to be of the iPad mini Wi-Fi and cellular models with A17 Pro chipset.
The iPad mini (2024) managed a single-core score of 2710 points and a multi-core score of 6543 points. For comparison, the previous iPad mini powered by A15 Bionic scored around 2100 points in single-core and 5400 points in multi-score testing.
The listing also reveals that the tablet comes with a six-core SoC architecture with 3.78GHz of peak clock speed and is paired with 8GB of RAM. Notably, the A17 Pro chip was introduced in the iPhone 15 Pro series phones and Apple revealed that the chipset packs a Hexa-core architecture, but the listing reveals that the iPad mini (2024) packs a five-core GPU.
The five-core GPU only confirms that the A17 Pro chip on the iPad mini (2024), is a downgraded variant of the A17 Pro processor. The reason behind this, according to MySmartPrice, could be that the iPad mini doesn"t require that much power, unlike iPhones. The new iOS 18.1 update carrying the Apple Intelligence features is expected in a few days.