We Already Know How Well the Apple M4 Chip Works
While new iPads are always interesting , the M4 chip in the iPad Pro has grabbed everyone’s attention this week. The M3 only came out in October , and Apple is deciding to release its successor now – on the iPad, and not on all devices. However, the chip is here, and it’s likely to be the core of Apple’s big AI plans this year .
Apple touted the 3nm M4 architecture , its four performance cores and upgraded six efficiency cores, and claimed it could deliver up to 1.5 times faster processor performance than the M2. (The company prefers to compare its chips to two previous generations rather than just one.) Of course, the iPad hasn’t been released yet, so reviewers and users can’t verify these claims. While we could just take Apple’s word for it, we could also just turn to Geekbench .
M4 stats will start appearing on Geekbench , a popular benchmarking site, on Wednesday. It’s unclear who is testing the M4 via Geekbench, but it gives an interesting insight into the chip’s performance. As of this writing, single-core performance ranges from 3,595 to 3,824, and multi-core from 13,910 to a whopping 14,748. (Single-core means testing one of the chip’s cores, while multi-core means testing multiple cores simultaneously. For context, the M4 has 10 cores in total CPU.)
The iPad Pros we tested run the yet-to-be-released iOS 17.5 with a base clock speed of 4.4GHz. They are equipped with 16 GB of RAM (although on Geekbench it is 15.05 GB).
These results are impressive, especially considering they’re running on an iPad (and the thinnest iPad ever made). Based on these scores, the M4 is marginally superior to the M3. If you look at the Geekbench results for the M3 MacBook Pro (note, not the M3 Pro or M3 Max), you’ll see a single-core score of 3,079 and a multi-core score of 11,524. If you look at the 6th generation iPad Pro with the M2 chip , the difference is more noticeable : Geekbench shows that this tablet has a single-core score of 2613 and a multi-core score of 10,082. This is almost a one and a half times increase in performance, which is close to Apple’s claims.
I’m interested to see how the M4 will perform when Apple puts it on the Mac. It’s possible that Apple is overclocking the M4 on the iPad because the tablets are so thin and light that they won’t be able to effectively dissipate the heat generated when pressing the chip. In theory, even a fanless MacBook Air would have a better chassis for heat distribution, so the M4 should perform even better. Place it in something like a MacBook Pro with a dedicated fan and the results should only improve, at least once you actually start using it.
But still, my main focus right now is on the NPU (neural processing unit) of the M4. This part of the chip is responsible for artificial intelligence processing, which Apple will likely focus on after WWDC . The company says the Neural Engine M4 is capable of 38 trillion operations and is 60 times faster than the company’s first NPU built for the A11 Bionic chip . (Again, Apple is comparing the stats to the chip released in 2017 for the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X.) Though I’m sure the M4 will be the best way to experience all the AI features Apple has in store. I’m skeptical that this will be a huge leap over the M3, M2 or even the M1. There may be features exclusive to the M4, but my guess is that Apple’s entire line of silicon chips will be sufficiently capable of delivering most of the new AI features in iOS 18 and macOS 15.