Apple unveiled the new iPad Pro at its special event in April titled ‘Spring Loaded’. The company showed off several other products as well – the new 24” iMac, location tracking AirTag, and a purple iPhone 12. The iPad Pro does stand out from the rest and it was actually a shocker announcement, as it is now powered by the M1 chip – the same chip being used in Mac computers.
Early benchmarks of the new iPad Pro suggest that the device is more than 50% powerful than the chip used in the previous generation iPad Pro. The A12X Bionic and the A12Z Bionic chips used in the previous generation iPad Pro models were plenty fast for the tasks they could perform. The M1 chips basically provide a headroom of performance, something that the iPad Pro cannot even utilize at the moment because of its limiting operating system.
Mac and iPad have never been closer
MacRumours has successfully obtained Geekbench 5 results of the new iPad Pro. The benchmark results suggest that the new 12.9” iPad Pro has an average single-core score of 1,718 and an average multi-core score of 7,284. For fair comparison, the previous generation iPad Pro with the A12Z Bionic chip had an average single-core score of 1,121 and an average multi-core score of 4,656.
Apple has indeed claimed that the new iPad Pro with the M1 chip is 50% faster than the previous version. The benchmark results show that the claims by the company are indeed correct. The results are very similar to the M1 powered Macs released last year – it does make sense as all of them use the same chip. The slight variations in the benchmark scores are very likely because of the different thermal enclosures in the machines.
The iPad Pro is set to release on May 21.
