Same performance of the iPhone 15 Pro?

Apple introduced the iPad mini 7 earlier this week, giving its smallest tablet the performance boost needed to support Apple Intelligence. This is the biggest upgrade to the iPad mini 7. Otherwise, the tablet is identical to its predecessor.

Apple didn’t choose one of the A18 chip variants for the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, opting for last year’s A17 Pro to power the iPhone 15 Pro models. The A18 and A17 Pro chips also have 8GB of RAM, which is a minimum requirement for Apple Intelligence.

And best of all, Apple made it possible for $499. The price of the iPad mini 7 corresponds to that of its predecessor despite the large increase in performance. I think this is a strong indication that the iPhone SE 4 will have a great starting price, even if the phone has the newer A18 chip.

It turns out that the iPad mini 7 doesn’t have exactly the same A17 Pro chip as the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max. Apple is using versions of the chip that weren’t good enough for last year’s Pro phones. But that shouldn’t affect performance too much.

The iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro features a 6-core CPU, a 6-core GPU, a 16-core Neural Engine, and 8GB of RAM.

The A17 Pro version of the iPad mini 7 is almost identical. The only difference concerns the GPU. We’re looking at a 5-core GPU compared to the iPhone 15 Pro. This information is visible on Apple’s website. All you need to do is check the product specification pages or use Apple’s comparison tools.

As 9to5Mac indicates that we are dealing with chip binning. Some chips do not meet the specified requirements during quality control during manufacturing. Instead of scrapping these chips, Apple is giving them a second life in other products. This has also happened in the past with other versions of the A-series chips.

Back to the iPad mini 7: Its A17 Pro chip will certainly be able to keep up with the performance of the iPhone 15 Pro in terms of CPU. The GPU might take a small performance hit, but I wouldn’t expect it to be too big. You can still run more resource-intensive apps and games on the tablet.

About a year ago, when we were expecting the iPad mini 7 to launch, I said that the iPad mini 7 would be Apple’s most powerful tablet if it got the A17 Pro chip. This was several months before the release of the M4 iPad Pro.

Back then, the A17 Pro benchmarks showed that the chip could outperform the M1 and M2 chips in single-core CPU tests. Apple had used these chips or the iPad Air 5 and iPad Pro generations that preceded the M4 variant.

A year later, the new iPad mini 7 is likely to be the second most powerful tablet in Apple’s product range after the M4 iPad Pro.