Apple M4 makes Geekbench debut alongside new iPad Pro

In a surprising turn of events Apple chose to unveil its new M4 chip alongside the new iPad Pro model. Unlike its predecessors which varied in GPU core count, this one comes in two variants- one with a 9-core CPU and the other with 10 cores. The latter has now shown up on Geekbench (H/T @negativeonehero on X).

The 10-core Apple M4 is benchmarked on Geekbench's Core ML Neural Engine Inference test, where it scores 9,234 points. Its previous-gen counterpart, the M2-powered iPad Pro, scores 7,393 in the same benchmark.

In essence, the Apple M4's NPU is about 24% faster than the Apple M2, at least in this test. It would be unfair to draw a comparison with an Apple M3 (8,331) because the chip only ever powered laptop and not iPads.

The listing also reveals a slight reduction in clock speed, with its CPU operating at 3.93 GHz (vs 4.05 GHz on the Apple M3). Furthermore, the iPad Pro in question seems to be running an early version of iPadOS 18.

While the Apple M4 delivers a decent performance uplift on the NPU side, it'll be interesting to see if it carries over to the CPU and GPU. An increase in multi-core performance is imminent due to the extra CPU cores, but single-core might take a hit due to slower clocks.