All hail the superpowered M1 iPad Pro

What creative apps will come to iPad Pro at WWDC?

The Apple-developed M1 chip inside the all-new iPad Pro makes it a more powerful machine than an Intel Core i9-powered 16-inch MacBook Pro, according to Geekbench 5 data.

M-powered pro tablet

While this isn’t totally surprising given how powerful we already know M1 chips are in use, it’s still a real sea change in the tablet as computers story. The MacBook Air and Mac mini are faster, of course:

• M1 Mac mini: 7,408
• M1 MacBook Air: 7,378
• M1 iPad Pro: 7,284
• Core i9 16-inch MacBook Pro: 6,845
• A12Z 12.9-inch iPad Pro: 4,656

As you can see, the new iPad Pro is therefore 51% faster than its predecessor with graphics performance up to 71% better, the statistics show.

And to put this into some perspective, the 8^th generation iPad offers 2,435 and iPhone X gave up 2,087 in multicore performance. Which means Apple has effectively trebled processor performance since 2017.

What’s a computer when Apple’s latest high-end tablet brings a Mac desktop class processor, 5G support and an XDR Retina display?

Not so bad for a first act

What’s so significant is that this is the first iteration of Apple’s M-series processors.

We know the company already has a road map, and early speculation around the M2 suggests we’ll be looking at another significant performance boost by then.

Of course, given Apple’s processor development plans for iPhones are already focused around an annual upgrade, it’s reasonable to anticipate big performance gains for Macs and for iPads on a near annual basis. Indeed, manufacturing of the M2 has allegedly begun.

In future, as we reach the limits of die size, we’ll see things like memory, graphics and AI performance emerge as the centers of future innovation.

Meanwhile, of course, eyes will be fixed on WWDC 2021, where we expect to find out just how Apple intends improving the iPad OS to exploit all that computational power. And, of course, what the upcoming MacBook Pro will deliver.

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