by Dan Moren
Apple’s binning M4 chips in the new iPad Pro models
Wes Davis, writing at The Verge:
The newly announced iPad Pro hides a sneaky upgrade option that Apple didn’t mention during its event today. When you cough up the $600 it costs to jump from the 256GB base model iPad Pro to the 1TB version, Apple doesn’t just double the RAM along with that — it also puts a faster chip inside, going from a nine-core M4 chip to a 10-core version.
One core is probably not going to make a lot of difference in most performance cases, but it does reinforce the fact that these chips are Apple’s newest and thus, presumably, more expensive to make. So it isn’t surprising that they’re using the 9-core version in the lower tiers of iPad Pros, along with providing half the RAM. (The M2s in the iPad Air, if you’re curious, all have the same specs: 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 8GB of RAM.)
I do kind of miss the days when I didn’t have to worry about processor cores and RAM in my iPad: sometimes ignorance really is bliss.