Nine-core M4 iPad Pro benchmarks leak, still smokes M2
A new set of alleged benchmarks for the nine-core M4 in the iPad Pro indicates that it will still provide buyers with a massive performance boost.
M4 iPad Pro
Following the launch of the M4 iPad Pro models, aninitial benchmark claimed to show the M4 as being very powerful. Now, a second seems to show both variants of the M4 chip will offer good performance to consumers.
The M4 generation consists of two versions. A top-tier variant has ten cores, consisting of four performance cores and six efficiency cores.
A second version exists with nine, available in some lower-capacity configurations of iPad Pro. That uses three performance cores along with six efficiency cores.
The second benchmark, surfacing on Sunday, is for an iPad referred to as "iPad 16,4" on Geekbench. The listing indicates it to be the nine-core variant due to its 3-core and 6-core cluster counts.
The two leaked M4 single-core benchmarks versus the M2
The Geekbench listing offers a single-core score of 3,630 and a multi-core score of 13,060.
When put against the previous 10-core benchmark leak, the nine-core M4's single-core result is quite close, being just 137 points behind. By contrast, the M2 in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro is at 2,540, 1,090 points behind.
On the multi-core side, the 9-core result is a bit behind the 10-core's 14,667. The ten-core is 12% better than the nine-core here, which makes sense given the extra core.
Leaked M4 benchmarks against M2 in multi-core testing
The M2, meanwhile, manages a mere 9,630. This means the nine-core M4 is still 35% better than the M2.
According to Apple's promotional material, the M4 delivers a 1.5-times improvement on CPU performance. While the ten-core benchmark seems to meet that mark, the nine-core is still pretty close.
However, while these benchmarks are plausible, they do occur before the actual release of the tablets to the public. It remains to be seen if these figures will hold up under the weight of multiple inbound benchmarks.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Anyone want to bet that we will see some refreshed Macs@WWDC with the M4? Since they are making a massive AI play it would make sense to get the M4 into both the IPadOS and macOS camps stat.
My old Mac with M1Max may need a refresh..
The remaining are the Mac mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro. It will be interesting if the monolithic M4 Ultra SoC is true. Mac Studios and Mac Pros with an M4 Ultra will be great machines, especially if they fixed GPU scaling.
The M4 essentially kills any M3 Pro SoCs and lower. I'll have to ruminate on how the new lineup would work.
I don't think Apple is worrying about Qualcomm. The M3 model effectively neutered any advantages the Snapdragon X Elite models have, and there are going to be a lot of compatibility issues for Qualcomm and MS to deal with before Windows ARM machines can really penetrate the market.
If I were Apple, what I would be looking for is when Microsoft decides to actually support ARM. If the support is really good, with cheap licensing, there are going to be some really cheap Windows PCs coming to market. Chromebook cheap, and could be performant enough to change the market. If you can get a $300 Windows machine that is as performant as a $1000 x86 machine? That spells trouble for a lot of OEMs.
I await when the day when Apple returns to the "Available Today" for the entire Consumer and Pro lineups. Won't happen, since marketing drives the ship nowadays, and spreading these releases throughout the year has its advantages, but would be nice.
Apple's current strategy are monolithic cores that are targeted to a content creation markets. So, they are striking a balance between CPU, GPU, NPU and dedicated ASIC performance. It's not optimized for a particular workflow, well, other than video. Even if they did a tiling architecture, there will be large costs to having a dedicated SoC for ML, or just CPUs or a lot more GPU cores.
So, it comes down to what workflows are they targeting? I do think that the days of systems with lots of CPU cores are over. They should be making the GPU cores more and more capable to do a lot of the workflows on CPUs. So, this is the only way really for Apple to maintain its SoC design strategy while addressing more workflows.
Apple getting these iPads out before the start of the 2024 back to school buying season is very important hopefully they will follow up by releasing the rest of the Mac lineup before the back to school (end of August/mid September buying season this year to maximize the available sales period.