The M4 was officially announced during Apple’s ‘Let Loose’ event, with the company praising the 10-core CPU version in droves. What thoroughly impressed us was when we reported that the latest chipset beat the M3 and M2 comprehensively while also managing a healthy lead against the M3 Pro and Snapdragon X Elite.
While some might attribute these performance gains to Apple switching to TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process for the M4, various findings reveal that the company has switched to the ARMv9 architecture with this release. In short, the new Apple Silicon can now run more complex tasks efficiently, which may also explain its high single-core and multi-core scores in Geekbench 6.
The biggest advantage that M4 has against the competition is support for Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), which helps raise performance across the board
With a 45 percent multi-core lead against the M2, raising the performance cores’ frequency to 4.40GHz and increasing the overall CPU core count is not the only change that Apple had to implement to reach a new score in Geekbench 6. According to YouTuber Vadim Yuryev, the M4 is now made using the ARMv9 instructions set, which is superior to NEON and allows the chipset to run complex workloads efficiently.
The content creator is not the only one who shared similar findings on X because a tipster going by the handle @negativeonehero also revealed through an external rumor that the M4 has support for SME or Scalable Matrix Extension. A discussion is happening under the tipster’s thread, contemplating if SME has actually benefitted the M4 in Geekbench 6’s single-core and multi-core performance runs.
M4 chip is finally using ARMv9 architecture which supports SME/SVE2 which means it can more efficiently run more complex workloads compared to previous NEON.
This means Geekbench scores might be higher than regular CPU rendering performance.
But for consumers, Geekbench is KING https://t.co/UZz01XpXl2 pic.twitter.com/cKX9qSBLr2
— Vadim Yuryev (@VadimYuryev) May 9, 2024
The replies given seem to indicate that this is the case while also mentioning that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will lack SME since it is based on the Snapdragon X Elite. This claim suggests that Qualcomm’s upcoming SoC could potentially be slower than the A18 Pro since the latter is also said to switch to the ARMv9 architecture, granting it similar performance attributes to the M4.
It might be true 👀 https://t.co/dEtFS7JJpl pic.twitter.com/FtfU8QJ4QV
— Nguyen Phi Hung (@negativeonehero) May 9, 2024
The interesting thing about these findings is that Apple did not mention that the M4 supports the new ARMv9 architecture. Stating this intricate detail while delivering on some benchmark comparisons might have excited more people about the latest release. It is possible that the company will divulge this information when it unveils the A18 and A18 Pro for the iPhone 16 family later this year, as that might force consumers to upgrade to the latest models. We will view more findings to be positively sure that the M4’s adoption of ARMv9 architecture is the reason for its massive performance gains, so stay tuned for more updates.