How fast is new iPad Pro and what did Apple hide during its presentation?

iPad Pro 2024, Apple's latest tablet, is the world's first device to feature the Apple M4 SoC. How fast is the new tablet with this chip? And what information did the manufacturer hide from potential buyers during the presentation?

According to the Geekbench database, the iPad Pro M4 has a single-core score of 3,767 and a multi-core score of 14,677. By comparison, the M2-based iPad Pro scores around 2,500 in single-threaded mode and around 10,000 in all-core mode. It turns out that the results of M4 are about 1.5 times better than those of M2.

Let us remind you that the M4 chip is based on the second generation 3nm process technology. It is equipped with a 10-core processor, and the top version includes 4 performance cores and 6 energy efficiency cores. The M4 also features a built-in 10-core GPU based on the next generation GPU architecture of the M3 series chips. This GPU provides dynamic caching features, Mesh Shading and hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

Interestingly, however, not all 2024 iPad Pros feature the same M4 chips: As it turns out, Apple uses different power M4s in the 256GB and 1TB iPad Pros. And during the presentation of the tablets, this detail was kept silent.

Buyers of versions with 1 TB and 2 TB of memory will receive not only double the amount of RAM (16 GB versus 8 GB), but also a more powerful M4 chip: 10-core instead of 9-core. True, you will have to pay $600 more for such pleasure than for the base iPad Pro model with 256 GB.

The 256GB and 512GB versions of the chips still feature a 10-core GPU, 120GB/s memory bandwidth, and support hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

As The Verge reports, this is the first time that different versions of the same tablet actually received different processors. In the past, regardless of options chosen, all iPad Pro models received the same chip.

On the other hand, The Verge believes that while the difference in performance between the two different versions of the chip may confuse the buyer, in everyday use people are unlikely to notice significant differences between the chips.