The M4 announcement during Apple’s ‘Let Loose’ event painted a rosy picture for potential buyers, and they would have likely believed that the latest iPad Pro models would have access to four performance and six efficiency cores. Unfortunately, that is not the case here because Apple cleverly hid the finer details from its audience, and to actually get the chipset with the 10-core CPU, you have to avoid the 256GB or 512GB models altogether. Hearing this is disappointing because the base model does not come cheap and is currently listed for pre-order at $999.
The M4 running in the 256GB and 512GB iPad Pro models features three performance cores instead of four
If you visit the ‘Tech Specs’ section of the iPad Pro on Apple’s website and scroll down, you will notice that the M4 has two variants with different performance cores. This is nothing new from Apple, as the company has always showcased its best possible version during the official announcement, hyping the chipset and the product it will eventually be found in. The silicon version in the iPad Pro’s 256GB or 512GB storage configurations is equipped with three performance and six efficiency cores, resulting in a 9-core cluster.
If you purchase the 1TB or 2TB versions of the iPad Pro, which will set you back by at least $1,599 for the Wi-Fi-only option, you will get the M4 with four performance and six efficiency cores. Having one less performance core will result in a ‘day and night’ difference in multi-core performance, but then again, that difference would probably only get highlighted in benchmark applications. In real-world scenarios, it is unlikely that users will spot the performance disparity, but Apple has a habit of taking advantage of consumers who want the absolute best in custom hardware.
Thankfully, the M4’s other features, such as the GPU’s hardware-accelerated mesh shading, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, Dynamic Caching, and 16-core Neural Engine, have not been altered, so it is not like Apple has completely gimped the chipset. Our take is that if the company were to introduce some differentiation to the M4, it should have been in the number of efficiency cores and not the performance cores, but that is Apple’s decision at the end of the day.