Apple iPad Air 4 scores better in Antutu than iPhone 12 despite having the same A14 Bionic processor

Even before Apple announced the iPhone 12 series, many of us already know the chipset that will power the device – Apple A14 Bionic. That’s because the new processor already made a debut a few weeks before inside the new iPad Air 4. Apple didn’t really give details on the chipset at that point. It was only during the iPhone 12 launch when the SoC was talked about at length. However, you may think that since it’s the same chip, both iPhone 12 and iPad Air 4 might be having almost the same power. It’s false. 

The A14 Bionic in iPhone 12 models might have tweaked to deliver a limited performance. And how do we know that? Because the new iPad Air 4 with A14 Bionic just beat iPhone 12 with same chipset in Antutu benchmark results.

Also read: Apple could bring under-display Touch ID to future iPhone models

The iPad Air 4 model with 4GB RAM and 256GB storage received some 660038 score whereas iPhone 12 with same storage and RAM capacities got around 564899. That is some 17% more for iPad Air 4. Breaking down the score, it was found that the CPU performance in iPad Air 4 was also faster by 9.5% while the GPU performance was better by up to 30%. 

The benchmarking website says that Apple may have limited the A14 Bionic’s performance due to a smaller battery capacity and to prevent overheating issues. Also, it might just be the same case with the iPhone 12 Pro models as well. However, since the Pro models have more battery, the performance might be a tad bit closer to that of iPad Air 4’s performance. But it cannot be confirmed though.

What might just be a let down here is that the when compared with iPhone 11 Pro, the GPU performance of iPhone 12 was slower. However, here we are comparing a Pro model with a non-Pro model.