iPad Pro's M4 Chip Outperforms M3 by Up to 25%

[JamieLannister]

All that power in the engine of the car and the wheels are elliptical. Next design should be a headless MacBook and and iPad attachment. Attach the iPad for macOS and remove for iPadOS. Even if it’s expensive I’d buy one. But for now having many iPad pros and MacBooks I’ll still use my MacBook all the time. And yes Apple is still the best products period. Just that the iPadOS is really pathetic when it comes to that last 10% of real work being done on it.

 

[ric22]

I hope there aren't two variants on Mac like there are on iPad... stats like those in this thread are already misleading because they belong to the "full fat" M4 rather than the gimped one that 99% of people will end up with in the iPad Pros.

 

[BigBrotherNowWatching]

The SoC is highly appreciated. If only those siliconsideloadingheadaches would disappear.

And why is icloud-Lockdown Mode still unfinished?

I wonder what the attitude of the next ceo will be.

Will he finally master the autocorrection horrors we are still going through?
Or maybe he is going to fix my broken GameCenter that threw me back into Steam again?
Will he innovate something that people actually want?

What if you where CEO?

One answer, two questions.
Jesus.

 

[ethanwa79]

With how these M4s are looking, it’s going to be difficult to wait until the M5 or M6 series to upgrade my M1 Pro. I’m going to wait, but this M4 appears to be the first significant upgrade from the M1 series and might be worth it for many people.

Of course, we won’t know if that’s true until we have real world benchmarks.

Same, I will most likely be upgrading my M1 Pro MacBook Pro to a M4 Extreme when it comes out.

 

[cigz]

Guess my M3 Pro MacBook Pro I just got is obsolete already.

Exactly. I got my in December and I'm not sure how I feel with the fact that "regular" SOC is faster than my "PRO" after not even half a year.
If I ever decided to upgrade my MacBook after this one, I'd go with "regular" M SOC, the "PRO" SOC is just not worth it (for my workflow at least).

 

[MaciekP]

Waiting for 9 Core m4 results most people will buy

 

[gusping]

This is all great, but Apple’s IPC gains from M1 to M4 are virtually 0%. Improvements have come from higher clockspeeds and more cores. I look forward to seeing where they go next. They can’t continue this method of improving forever. AMD are pretty relentless atm. I’ve given up on Intel.

 

[crazy dave]

Looking forward to seeing these chips in Macs. I was reading in some discussion threads that part of the CPU score bump could be related to the new ML accelerators (ARM's SME)? It seems like those are the tasks where performance score really increased, the other tasks were much more equivalent to M3 performance.

Per Tom's Hardware:

The remainder of the benchmark score indicates a roughly 3% increase in performance over the prior gen M3, but we'll have to wait for more detailed testing to determine if those are the result of IPC improvements or merely from frequency increases and/or cache clock changes."

The author at Tom's Hardware screwed up this paragraph a bit - it's 3% on top of the clock increases. The clock increased by about 8-9%, object detection on the CPU increased by 200%, and most of the rest of the subtests increased by over 10%, with at least one (if not more) increasing by less than 10%, averaging to about 3% over the clock increases. That indicates a microarchitecture change beyond SME as some subtest increase more than the clock while others see a slight regression with respect to the clock.

This is all great, but Apple’s IPC gains from M1 to M4 are virtually 0%. Improvements have come from higher clockspeeds and more cores. I look forward to seeing where they go next. They can’t continue this method of improving forever. AMD are pretty relentless atm. I’ve given up on Intel.

That's over an average of non-object detection sub tests in Geekbench (which is kind of a meaningless statistic as most averages over subtests are), depending on your workloads, you may see greater or lesser IPC gains.

 

[erikkfi]

Okay but how is it compared to the A9X in my current iPad Pro? At the time Phil Schiller -- who by the way never lies or exaggerates -- said that it "beats most portable PCs in both CPU and graphics tasks."

 

[thingstoponder]

Cue all the "it's too much power for such a limited OS" comments.

Some people hate when computers get faster. It’s very odd.

 

[me Matty83]

Will an iPad user, pro or otherwise, ever make use of all that power?

Unless iPadOS 18 provides significantly more powerful features, it seems such a waste.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve ordered an 11” M4 iPad Pro (256GB), especially for the OLED display, but the processor just seems like overkill given iPadOS’ limitations.

 

[lovehateapple]

This bodes well for all future Macs, especially MBPs!

 

[Spock]

Pity there really isn't anything to take advantage of all that power on the iPad "Pro" that you don't have to pay a subscription for.

Then they will upsell you to a MacBook Pro with M4 for a few hundred more

 

[andrewxgx]

Guess my M3 Pro MacBook Pro I just got is obsolete already.

given how they started castrating it from M2 Pro, at this point they might skip M4 Pro completely and just put M4 everywhere, and add M4 Max as an paid upgrade when you need it

 

[Tito360]

Cue all the "it's too much power for such a limited OS" comments.

Fast or snappier pick one

 

[smulji]

This is all great, but Apple’s IPC gains from M1 to M4 are virtually 0%. Improvements have come from higher clockspeeds and more cores. I look forward to seeing where they go next. They can’t continue this method of improving forever. AMD are pretty relentless atm. I’ve given up on Intel.

The industry, in general, is running into the same issue.

 

[gaximus]

Guess my M3 Pro MacBook Pro I just got is obsolete already.

That's a gamble, who would have known they were going to release an M4, I thought they done at 3.

 

[SVTmaniac]

That's a gamble, who would have known they were going to release an M4, I thought they done at 3.

I knew an M4 was eventually coming. What I didn't know was that the base M4 would be faster than my M3 "Pro" not very Pro like of my M3.

 

[lkrupp]

Cue all the "it's too much power for such a limited OS" comments.

Well this is MacRumors after all. What did you expect?

 

[MacsRgr8]

That might be premature, see the quotes in https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...performs-m3-by-up-to-25.2425947/post-33123550
You can’t necessarily extrapolate real-life performance from Geekbench scores.

Hmmm... thanks for that. Very interesting

 

[sw1tcher]

• M4 - 3,695/14,550
• M1 - 2,272/8,208

fourth generation chip and less than 2x performance increase over the first gen chip? are my expectations to high? seems... meh?

You're looking at an average increase in performance of just under 13% a year. Were you expecting better?

This is why it doesn't make sense for people to upgrade every year as the improvements won't be that noticeable.

 

[TechnoMonk]

I am more blown away by power and thermal efficiencies. Can’t wait for what they do with Ultra and Max.

 

[citysnaps]

Pity there really isn't anything to take advantage of all that power on the iPad "Pro" that you don't have to pay a subscription for.

Procreate is $12.99. Procreate Dreams (for animation) is $19.99. Both are a one-time purchase and outstanding apps.

 

[dandy1117]

All that power in the engine of the car and the wheels are elliptical. Next design should be a headless MacBook and and iPad attachment. Attach the iPad for macOS and remove for iPadOS. Even if it’s expensive I’d buy one. But for now having many iPad pros and MacBooks I’ll still use my MacBook all the time. And yes Apple is still the best products period. Just that the iPadOS is really pathetic when it comes to that last 10% of real work being done on it.

I understand that my continuous effort to share my point of view as a B2B app developer may seem pointless, but I believe it's crucial to remind people on forums that many industries rely on iPad Pro as a computer and do not consider it a limited device. It's important to understand that it's a tablet computer and not a less capable version of a laptop.

Our company developed a custom iPad app for a medium-sized real estate firm. This app allows their staff to perform various tasks in the field, such as uploading property pictures, editing the inventory database, scanning and marking-up documents, and conducting video tours and conferences using the front and rear cameras simultaneously. Additionally, they can use the iPad to watch videos or television shows, such as ESPN, while waiting for clients. (shhhh!🤫🤫) We recently implemented augmented reality (AR) functionality, which will allow the staff to do virtual staging based on the potential buyers’ style or corporate branding theme. We also plan to use LiDAR technology to automatically update and measure the floor plan. The staff considers the iPad the most powerful computer they’ve ever used because it significantly improves their professional workflow with a device and form factor that surpasses traditional mobile laptops.

 

[TechnoMonk]

Looking forward to seeing these chips in Macs. I was reading in some discussion threads that part of the CPU score bump could be related to the new ML accelerators (ARM's SME)? It seems like those are the tasks where performance score really increased, the other tasks were much more equivalent to M3 performance.

Per Tom's Hardware:

Lot of speculation in the thread. Wait isn’t long, we shall see in a week.