Apple’s new M4 chip blows M3 out of the water in early benchmark leaks — M4 iPad Pro could be faster than an M3 Pro MacBook

The earliest benchmarks of Apple’s brand new M4 chip, which powers its new M4 iPad Pro, indicate that it offers multi-core performance gains of up to 25% over M3, and is even faster than M3 Pro. 

Apple unveiled its new best iPad, replete with a stunning new OLED display, at its May 7 Let Loose event this week alongside the iPad Air 6 and the new Apple Pencil Pro. Aside from the display and a much thinner design, the big news is the next generation of the M-series chip, the first Apple silicon chip to make its debut in a tablet, rather than a Mac. 

As is often the case, benchmarks are now starting to leak out ahead of the official release date of May 15. The first of these, spotted on Geekbench by ExoticSpice101 on X, has revealed some absolutely staggering performance gains over the previous M3 model.  

M4 chip shows early promise 

Apple’s new M4 chip is the company’s fourth-generation Apple silicon processor for Mac and iPad. It’s built on the second generation of 3nm technology, which manufacturing partner TSMC uses to pack more transistors and efficiency into its chips than ever before. The iPad variant also comes with a new display engine to power the OLED tandem stack in the display. More aptly for the future of Mac, it also comes with up to 10 CPU cores, with six efficiency cores and four performance cores, two more overall than M3. Performance gains were to be expected then, but these early figures show even more promise than we might have guessed. 

The iPad tested is either a 1TB or 2TB version of the M4 iPad Pro. We know this because it clocks 16GB of RAM and the aforementioned 10 CPU cores. The two smaller storage configurations only come with 8GB of RAM and a nine-core CPU with just three performance cores. According to the stats, the M4 chip clocked single-core and multi-core scores of 3,767 and 14,677 respectively. 

Based on the M3 chip’s highest scores, 3,087 single-core (M3 MacBook Pro), and 11,702 multi-core (M3 iMac), the M4 delivers performance increases of over 22% and over 25% respectively. In fact, as noted by Vadim Yuryev on X, that multi-core score is actually faster than the 11-core version M3 Pro chip found in Apple’s 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro. 

The early scores bode well, not only for power users interested in Apple’s new tablets, but those awaiting the A18 chips in the iPhone 16 and the Mac’s powered by M4 coming later this year. Yuryev speculates that Apple’s M-series chips have undergone a major core architecture overhaul that is powering these performance gains and that the company may go into more technical details later in the year at WWDC 2024 or a fall Mac event. “Today’s M4 chip benchmark leaks confirm that there’s a LOT of new tech going into these brand new overhauled cores,” he stated. 

While iPad users don’t live their lives in benchmarks, the early M4 tests reveal the next generation of Apple silicon promises to be an absolute doozy. Apple’s new tablets are just the tip of the iceberg. Expect M4 Pro, Max, and maybe even Ultra to continue this trend.

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Stephen Warwick has written about Apple for five years at iMore and previously elsewhere. He covers all of iMore’s latest breaking news regarding all of Apple’s products and services, both hardware and software. Stephen has interviewed industry experts in a range of fields including finance, litigation, security, and more. He also specializes in curating and reviewing audio hardware and has experience beyond journalism in sound engineering, production, and design. Before becoming a writer Stephen studied Ancient History at University and also worked at Apple for more than two years. Stephen is also a host on the iMore show, a weekly podcast recorded live that discusses the latest in breaking Apple news, as well as featuring fun trivia about all things Apple. Follow him on Twitter @stephenwarwick9