The M4 was officially unveiled at Apple's "Let Loose" event, with the company praising the performance of the 10-core CPU version. Impressively, the latest chip outperformed both the M3 and M2, establishing a significant lead over the M3 Pro and Snapdragon X Elite in the competitive landscape.
Some people may attribute these performance improvements to Apple's use of TSMC's second-generation 3nm process in the M4, but various surveys indicate that Apple has adopted the ARMv9 architecture in the M4 released this time. In short, the new Apple chip can now efficiently handle more complex tasks, which is why it achieves high single-core and multi-core scores in Geekbench 6.
The multi-core performance is 45% ahead of the M2, and increasing the performance core frequency to 4.40GHz and adding CPU total cores are not the only changes Apple has made to achieve new results in Geekbench 6. According to YouTuber Vadim Yuryev, the M4 now uses the ARMv9 instruction set, which is superior to the NEON instruction set, allowing the chip to efficiently handle complex workloads.
On X, there is more than just this content creator sharing similar findings, as a leaker named @negativeonehero has also hinted through external rumors that the M4 supports SME or Scalable Matrix Extension. In a thread by this leaker, a discussion is ongoing to explore whether SME truly benefits the M4 in single-core and multi-core performance scores on Geekbench 6.
Responses seem to suggest this, while also mentioning that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will lack SME as it is based on the Snapdragon X Elite. This claim implies that Qualcomm's upcoming SoC may be slower than the A18 Pro, as the latter is rumored to also switch to ARMv9 architecture, potentially mirroring the performance attributes of the M4.
Interestingly, Apple has not mentioned M4 supporting the new ARMv9 architecture. Providing some benchmark comparisons while elucidating these intricate details could spark more excitement among people for the latest product releases. The company might reveal this information when they launch the A18 and A18 Pro of the iPhone 16 series later this year.
