Performance and Connectivity

At Apple’s recent product event, the addition of the previously Mac-only M1 processor to the iPad Pro was among the biggest announcements—and biggest surprises. The M1 is an Arm-based chip that Apple has developed in house with the aim of enhancing performance and battery life. While the iPad Pro with M1 is not available just yet, previous benchmarks for the M1 suggest a major performance advantage for the chip. One recent benchmark found the M1 beating nearly all of Intel’s latest 11th-gen processors, for instance. The processor in the Galaxy Tab S7 is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus Mobile Platform, which Samsung has touted as “the fastest processor in a Galaxy Tab ever”—featuring up to 25-percent faster CPU performance and up to 36-percent faster graphics performance than the Tab S6. While that processor makes the Galaxy Tab S7 faster than most Android tablets on the market, Geekbench 5 benchmark scores for the M1 and Snapdragon 865 Plus show a sizable speed advantage for the M1, both in single-core and multi-core tests. Memory also impacts performance, of course, and the iPad Pro also offers 8GB or 16GB of RAM—compared to 6GB or 8GB for the Galaxy Tab S7.

Other major upgrades on the new iPad Pro models include the addition of support for 5G for the first time. Samsung beat out Apple in that regard, however, launching variants of the Galaxy Tab S7 that supported 5G last year—which at the time were the first tablets to support 5G in the U.S. Both the Apple and Samsung tablets support the higher-speed version of 5G, known as mmWave, as well as sub-6 5G.