Apple announced the M4-powered iPad Pro 2024 at its big Let Loose event, and the internet has been positively buzzing over how powerful the new tablet could be. Unlike with most other Apple chips, which land in a Mac before they appear in an iPad to give us an idea of the overall power, the iPad is leading the charge with Apple's M4 silicon.
Thankfully, the new iPad didn't take long to find its way onto benchmarking apps, which helps us get a feel for how it compares to other devices. As you might expect, the numbers are nothing short of impressive.
An X user named negativeonehero posted the iPad Pro M4 Geekbench ML score, which tests the Neural Engine Inference. The test was performed with the more expensive 10-core version of the M4 chip, which is available with the higher-end iPad Pro models. In the test, Apple's latest scored 9,234 points, which is a considerable improvement over the M2-based iPad Pro 2022 and its score of 7,393.
It's worth noting that the iPad used to run the test was listed as having iPadOS 18 installed. As that's pre-release software, further optimizations could come with the final release.
The M3 chip scored 8,331 on the test, but that device is only featured in Apple's laptops, so the scaling is a little different and is not exactly a one-to-one comparison.
Unfortunately, the CPU and GPU tests haven't surfaced on Geekbench yet, so we can only get a feel for the NPU power. In this case, the M4's clock speed is actually a bit slower than the M3's. The Geekbench results show 3.93GHz compared to 4.05GHz. That could cause slightly lower single-core scores when those tests are run, but we'll have to wait and see.
There really is no comparison with other tablets. For example, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra has scores in the 1,200 range, while the Pixel Tablet has scores around 2,100. The only other devices putting up scores in the same range as the M4 iPad Pro are laptops, which makes these numbers all the more exciting for what the new iPad could be capable of from an AI and neural processing standpoint.
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