Products You May Like
Apple revealed a new generation of its custom Arm-based silicon earlier this year, but it took the unusual step of releasing the M4 first in a new iPad Pro model. This move was emblematic of Apple’s shift to mobile and touch computing versus its legacy laptop business, but the MacBook Pro isn’t being left in the lurch. The upcoming M4-powered machine has made an appearance on Geekbench, and yes, it’s very fast.
The M4 is built on TSMC’s 3nm process node, which is still the most advanced currently available. The chip has a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, which is the same design as the M3. However, the updated instruction set and more power-efficient design should make it moderately faster. There’s also an enhanced neural processing unit (NPU) as one would expect in the age of AI. Apple says the NPU can manage an impressive 38 TOPS.
The newly revealed benchmark doesn’t touch the AI cores—it’s the standard Geekbench test of CPU and GPU performance. The wide usage of that benchmark does make it easier to compare the capabilities of the M4, though.
The M4 MacBook Pro pulls down 3,864/15,288 for the single/multi-core CPU test, and 38,153 for the OpenCL GPU test. If we compare that with the M3 MacBook Pro, the single-core speed is up about 25%, and multicore is 32% higher. The GPU compute is benchmarking roughly 25% higher in this test for the new chip—it’s unclear if that compute boost will make games any faster, though. The MacBook numbers are slightly higher than the numbers from the M4 iPad, possibly due to a better thermal solution.
Credit: Primate Labs
Microsoft has tried on and off for years to make Arm-based Windows laptops work, but Apple leapfrogged it when announcing the M1 chip in 2020. The decision to leave x86 behind has been a success for Apple, which boasts longer battery life and more efficient multithreaded workloads than competing machines. Qualcomm is now offering the first viable Arm processors for Windows machines, and both Intel and AMD are working to make their x86 chips more efficient and adept at AI.
While the numbers from the M4 leak are a bit higher, there’s more to come. We also expect to see M4 Pro and M4 Max chips when Apple releases the new MacBook Pros. In past generations, the Pro and Max chips have offered more capabilities and much higher speeds. This silicon shift will continue reshaping the industry as computing priorities shift, but Apple’s lead might not hold up forever.