Yes, of course there are caveats, and we’ll get to those. But as defensible claim, we can say that Apple’s advancements in chip design and manufacturing processes have now made the iPhone in your pocket faster than the entry-level desktop computers they were selling just two years ago. Crazy, right?
CPU performance
If there’s a place to equivocate about a “faster” claim, it’s in the CPU performance. Let’s take a look at Geekbench 6 and Geekbench 7 numbers. The M4 numbers here are from a Mac mini with the full 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU.
Foundry
Apple called the two big super cores in the A20 Pro “desktop class” and it’s hard to argue when the single-core performance is 28 percent higher than the M4. But the M4 has 10 cores and the A20 Pro has 6, so it’s just got 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, with represent more strenuous and modern workloads, tell a similar story. Single-core performance of the little computer in your pocket is 22 percent higher than the bigger computer on your desk. The multi-core benefit of the M4 is about 27 percent here, despite having 67 percent more cores.
So yes, multi-threaded performance and multitasking on the M4 will be faster than the A20 Pro, for tasks that heavily utilize all the CPU cores. But for any task that is limited by the performance of a single thread (which are quite common), the A20 Pro is quite a bit faster than the M4.
GPU performance
Modern computing platforms rely in GPU performance as much as CPU performance, perhaps even more so. Does the M4 hold an advantage there? Nope!
