New iPhones always ship in September with an incremented A series chip. The single exception was the A5, which shipped with the iPad 2 six months before the iPh

New iPhones always ship in September with an incremented A series chip. The single exception was the A5, which shipped with the iPad 2 six months before the iPhone 4S. Apart from the iPad 2, new top-of-the-line iPads have almost always shipped with the existing highest-numbered A series chip in an X variant. The single exception was the first iPad Air, which shipped with a regular A7. So this is indeed the first time that a new high-end iPad has shipped with a lower-numbered CPU than the most recent iPhone.