New iPad equipped with Apple M4 appears on Geekbench
On the evening of May 7, 2024, Beijing time, Apple hosted a special event titled “Let Loose,” where they unveiled the latest iPad Pro and iPad Air. The new iPad Pro, for the first time, is equipped with the M4 chip, bringing robust performance enhancements to the device. Although the official launch is scheduled for May 15, some users have already received the new product and conducted Geekbench benchmark tests, with the results proving quite spectacular.
According to the Geekbench scores, the device identified as iPad 16,6, with the motherboard model J721AP running on iOS 17.5, achieved a single-core score of 3810 and a multi-core score of 14541. This represents a performance increase of approximately 45.7% over the 11-inch iPad Pro equipped with the M2 chip (3.49GHz) for both single and multi-core scores and more than a 20% performance lead over the MacBook Air with the M3 chip.
The data also reveals that the new iPad’s CPU, which shares the specifications with Apple’s latest full-spec M4 chip, is built on the Arm architecture with a 10-core configuration (4 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores) and operates at a core frequency of 4.4GHz. Additionally, the chip includes 128KB of L1 instruction cache, 64KB of L1 data cache, and 4MB of L2 cache. The device’s operational memory is shown to be 15.05GB, which likely totals 16GB including the system reserve.
Moreover, another device identified as iPad16,3 appeared earlier on Geekbench, only providing its machine learning score of 9234, indicating certain improvements over the M3. Notably, this device, running on the newer iOS 18 system with the motherboard model J717AP and a core frequency of 3.93GHz, might represent a smaller version with more conservative performance capabilities. However, the CPU specifications of both devices are identical, lending some relevance to these scores.
The M4 chip, crafted using the second-generation 3nm process technology and incorporating 28 billion transistors, is based on the SoC architecture, further enhancing energy efficiency and contributing to the new iPad Pro’s remarkably sleek design. It features a 10-core CPU, including up to four performance cores and six efficiency cores; the new generation cores utilize enhanced branch prediction technology, with the high-performance cores equipped with wider bandwidth decoding and execution engines, while the efficiency cores feature deeper execution engines. Paired with a 10-core GPU, built upon the new generation graphics processor architecture from the M3 series, it introduces dynamic cache, hardware-accelerated grid shading, and ray tracing capabilities to the iPad for the first time. Integrated is Apple’s fastest-ever neural engine, capable of processing up to 38 trillion operations per second; a new-generation machine learning accelerator; and an advanced media engine that supports AV1 decoding, along with popular video codecs like H.264, HEVC, and ProRes.
