Yes, of course there are caveats, and we’ll get to them. But as a defensible claim, we can say that Apple’s advances in chip design and manufacturing processes have now made the iPhone in your pocket faster than the entry-level desktop computers they sold just two years ago. Crazy, right?
cpu performance
If there’s one place to be wrong about a “faster” claim, it’s in CPU performance. Let’s take a look at the Geekbench 6 and Geekbench 7 numbers. The M4 numbers here are from a Mac mini with a full 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU.
Foundry
Apple called the A20 Pro’s two big supercores “desktop class,” and it’s hard to argue when single-core performance is 28 percent higher than the M4. But the M4 has 10 cores and the A20 Pro has 6, so it has too big an advantage in multi-core processing. Still, it’s only 13 percent faster despite having more cores to work with.
Foundry
The newer Geekbench 7 scores, which represent more strenuous and modern workloads, tell a similar story. The single-core performance of the small computer in your pocket is 22 percent greater than that of the largest computer on your desk. The M4’s multicore benefit is around 27 percent here, despite having 67 percent more cores.
So yes, multithreaded performance and multitasking on the M4 will be faster than on the A20 Pro, for tasks that heavily use all the CPU cores. But for any tasks that are limited by single-threaded performance (which are quite common), the A20 Pro is quite a bit faster than the M4.
GPU performance
Modern computing platforms rely as much on GPU performance as they do on CPU performance, perhaps even more so. Does the M4 have any advantages in that regard? No!
