Apple's SoC has always been mysterious. It needs to be disassembled and then analyzed in detail to know the secret. Chipworks made an in-depth analysis of the A8X used on the iPad Air 2, and found that it did use a three core CPU and eight core GPU structure.

From the perspective of internal structure, the A8 adopts a rare three core design on the mobile processor, three upgraded Cyclone cores, with a frequency of 1.5GHz. The GPU is the PowerVR GXA6850 with a horrible eight core design, and is also the top model in the PowerVR Series6XT series. The core area of A8X is about 125mm ², while that of GXA6850 is about 38mm ².