Whether by accident or intent, Apple listed the M2 iPad Air's GPU as having 10 cores at the time of the product announcement, but it actually only has 9 cores, and Apple now appears to be correcting its product pages and support pages.
Apple Says "It's 9 Cores, But the Performance Claims Are Accurate"
This change came to light after 9to5Mac was first to report that the M2 iPad Air's specifications page had been quietly altered. Apple had initially released no information about this change, simply updating the information on its official website. According to archived data, this change appears to have been made in late May.
Subsequently, an Apple spokesperson issued a statement in response to an inquiry from 9to5Mac. Here is the statement in full:
We have updated Apple.com to correct the core count for the M2 iPad Air. All performance claims for the M2 iPad Air are accurate and are based on the 9-core GPU.
The performance claims referred to here are likely the ones mentioned at the time of the announcement: that "the new iPad Air is nearly 50 percent faster than the previous iPad Air with M1," and that "compared to the iPad Air with A14 Bionic, the new iPad Air delivers up to 3x faster performance."
Whether this was simply a typo, or whether Apple was originally planning to sell a 10-core GPU but was forced to sell a version with one core disabled due to yield issues, the cause of this change remains unknown. Incidentally, 9to5Mac points out that while there have previously been M2 chips with either 8-core or 10-core GPU configurations, this is the first time a 9-core configuration has appeared.
The results of a 3D Mark Wild Life Extreme benchmark test that the author ran on an M2 iPad Air purchased recently are shown below. As for GPU performance, it doesn't appear there's actually a 50% performance increase over the M1 iPad Air.
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