When Apple announced the new OLED iPad Pro a couple of weeks ago it brought with it a surprising spec in the form of the first M4 chip. There had been rumblings it could happen, but it was still a shock that it actually did. Benchmarks have shown that the M4 is a very capable piece of silicon and now someone has made it a record-breaker as well.
That record comes in the form of being the first chip to break the 4,000 mark in Geekbench testing, something that no other chip has managed to date. It also means that the M4 eclipses powerhouse chips like the Intel Core i9-13900KS all while running inside a tablet.
The catch? This M4 chip might have been in an iPad Pro, but you won't be getting a 4,000 score from the one in yours — unless you smother it in liquid nitrogen.
Liquid nitrogen? That's so ... cool!
The incredible score of 4,001 came after someone attached a huge cooling block to the back of an iPad Pro and then filled it with liquid nitrogen before sharing their results on the Chinese platform Bilibili. Notebookcheck picked up the results, and they're mightily impressive.
The single-core result of 4,001 is notably faster than the circa 3,700 that can be achieved without the new cooling method which suggests that the M4 has some headroom. We can expect that any future M4 Mac with a fan built-in will make use of that headroom, too.
The impressive score came in the form of the single-core figures only, however, with the multi-core score unimpacted by the new cooling. It's thought that Geekbench's multi-core test doesn't run long enough to heat up the cores enough for extra cooling to have an effect, but we could expect that longer workflows such as video work would benefit from a fan at the very least.
