Most of the interest regarding Xiaomi’s upcoming product launches may be centered around the company’s much talked-about flagship smartphone, the Mi 5, but the company is also slated to launch a successor to its premium tablet, the Mi Pad. The Mi Pad 2, as the tablet is expected to be named, has been talked about quite a bit in recent times, and earlier reports have also indicated that it has already been certified in China. Now, the upcoming device has popped up on the GeekBench database, which seems to indicate that the Xiaomi Mi Pad 2 may be fairly close to an official unveiling. The upcoming tablet, whose information was uploaded to the website on November 5th but is only being noticed now, apparently comes with the Intel Atom X5-Z8500 chipset under the hood. While not much of the hardware specs are revealed through the current listing, the aforementioned Intel chip does come with a quad-core 64-bit application processor, which is clocked at a frequency of 2.24 GHz. The only other thing the listing reveals is the possible presence of 2 GB of RAM in the upcoming gadget.
With a single-core score of 985 and a multi-core score of 3268, the chip does seem to be a decent enough performer, although the scores are a notch below the original Mi Pad launched last year with the Nvidia Tegra K1 chip, which came with a quad-core 2.2 GHz Cortex-A15 CPU and an ULP GeForce Kepler GPU. Of course, Intel has never been big on synthetic benchmark scores even with its desktop processors, so it will be interesting to note how this current lineup of efficient Atom chips stand up to the competition in the real world.
The one interesting thing this listing does reveal is the fact that the Mi Pad will very definitely have an Android variant even if it comes in its Windows 10 avatar as per earlier rumors. That’s because the listing on Geekbench clearly states Android 5.1 as the OS of choice on the upcoming tablet from Xiaomi. It remains to be seen however, if the device comes only in an Android version as opposed to earlier rumors, or if Xiaomi launches two different versions of the tab – one with Windows 10 (X86-64) and another running Android. Meanwhile, a third option is also being talked about – that of a dual-boot option with Windows and Android, which will of course, be the best of both worlds.
