@matigo I bought a basic 16 GB iPad Mini (512 MB RAM) a few months after buying a 32 GB iPad 3 - aka “The New iPad” - which had 1 GB of RAM.
I ran the Geekbench app and the non-retina Mini had a better score.
All that extra RAM was used up by the 3’s retina display. Both had 1 GHz processors, an A5 in the Mini & an A5X in the 3.