Apple’s M4 is surprisingly speedy

Apple presented the M4 chip last week. The new system-on-a-chip (SoC) comes just six months after its predecessor. At first glance, the improvements compared to the M3 seem relatively minor – the CPU receives two additional efficiency cores. Otherwise, the data sheet looks the same. At the reveal, Apple suspiciously only compared the new chip with the M2.

But appearances can be deceiving. I got myself the iPad Pro, both featuring the strong and weak version of the M4 – and put it up against its predecessors. Due to Apple’s system, there are only a few benchmarks. But even these allow us to draw encouraging conclusions.

Apparently, the new N3E manufacturing process by TSMC enables significantly higher performance from individual cores. The M3 was still based on the first 3-nanometre process N3B. It wasn’t fully developed, inefficient and expensive as a result. This is probably also the main reason why Apple is revising the SoCs after such a short time. The M4 now shows the true potential of 3-nanometre production.

CPU: Qualcomm who?

In my benchmarks, the M4 delivers over 20 per cent more performance than the M3 – a considerable improvement within six months. It’s even better than the change from M2 to M3. Granted, that was the changeover from 5 to 3 nanometres.

I’m particularly impressed by the single-core score over 3,700. It’s far higher than that of the current Intel flagship Core i9-14900K. Just like the M3, it scores around 3,100 points. The upcoming Snapdragon X Elite from Qualcomm is only expected to achieve a round 2,900 points.

The M4 delivers this outstanding performance in a passively cooled tablet. According to Geekbench, the performance cores clock at 4.4 gigahertz – 0.35 more than the M3. A few overclockers cooled the iPad Pro with liquid nitrogen. The M4 even broke through the 4,000-point barrier here.

The Multi Core score result is quite something too. Even the iPad with a slimmed-down M4 and three performance cores clearly outperforms the predecessor chip. The full version with four performance cores is slightly below the level of a Snapdragon X Elite. However, that one has twelve cores, all of which are designed for both performance and efficiency – and the score comes from Qualcomm’s own reference system. So the comparison is flawed. An equivalent competitor would be the M4 Pro in a MacBook Pro. It’s expected to release in the autumn – and should literally pulverise Qualcomm’s chip.

GPU: not a quantum leap, but better

The GPU progress isn’t quite as great. In Geekbench’s Metal test, it achieves 13 per cent more points than the M3, in 3DMark Wildlife Extreme it’s only four. However, the results in the GPU-based machine learning benchmark from Geekbench are interesting. Here, the M4 is a whopping 34 per cent faster. I suspect this is down to better optimisation.

Neural Engine: Apple is ready for AI

Apple praises the M4 as an incredibly powerful chip for artificial intelligence (AI). The reason why? Its Neural Engine. It can perform 38 trillion computing operations per second (TOPS). This figure doesn’t mean anything to me, but it’s below Qualcomm’s figure of 45 TOPS for the Snapdragon Elite X. At the presentation, Apple only compared the engine with the first version in the A11 Bionic.

Still, Neural Engine in the M4 seems to be a solid step forward. In Geekbench’s test, it scores 18 per cent higher than the M3 – and 34 per cent higher than the M2. As this is a single cross-platform benchmark, this result should be treated with caution.

AI acceleration is likely to become important for Apple in the future. In June, the Californian company will likely present a whole flood of AI features. If these aren’t all to be processed in the cloud, smartphones, tablets and computers will need a lot of power. That’s where the new chips will come in handy.

You’ll soon find out what the performance of the M4 can already be used for in the iPad Pro test report. Fellow editor Michelle Brändle is currently putting it through its paces away from the SoC.