Leaked Apple iPad Pro M5 benchmark shows massive improvements

A new leaked benchmark shows Apple’s alleged M5 chip on an iPad, and it’s almost as fast as a desktop CPU.

We know that Apple is really good at designing chips. Most of its chips have always outperformed competitors, including Intel and Qualcomm. The M5 is no exception.

As spotted on Geekbench, an alleged benchmark of an unreleased iPad model shows it with an M5 chip.

It has a single-thread score of 4,133 points, and the multi-thread score sits at 15,437. The processor, which appears to be some variant of the M5, is clocked at 4.42 GHz.

It also has 12GB RAM, likely coupled up with 256GB/512GB storage.

M5 on iPad vs Snapdragon X Elite 2

When I spotted benchmarks of the Apple M5, I wondered how it was going to perform against the Snapdragon X Elite 2.

For those unaware, Qualcomm recently unveiled the Snapdragon X Elite 2, its most powerful chip for Windows PCs.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, which is the most powerful variant in the lineup, is an 18-core Oryon design with a boost up to 5.0 GHz on two cores.

While the Snapdragon X Elite 2 isn’t here just yet and we won’t see any device running the chip until 2026, we know a bit about its performance.

In one Geekbench 6.5 benchmark, it scores about 4,080 in single-core and 23,491 in multi-core tests.

It’s a good number, and it clearly beats an iPad with the M5.

However, Apple’s tablet still wins in single-thread performance by a nose in these early numbers.

The X2 Extreme pulls comfortably ahead in multi-thread because it has double the cores and can sustain higher total throughput in a laptop chassis.

We’re comparing an iPad with a full-fledged desktop CPU (Snapdragon), and it’s still able to compete, which says a lot about Apple’s per-core design and frequency at low power.