A $699 tablet beating an iPad Pro in a CPU test sounds odd, yet that is what an early Geekbench 7 listing shows for the iPad mini (2026). Its single-core score of 3,879 is about 8% above the 3,580 posted by the M5 iPad Pro 13. The Pro still leads in multi-core by 53%, with 15,126 points against the mini's 9,870.
The gap comes down to the chip. The listing shows an A20 Pro with two performance cores at 4.93 GHz and three efficiency cores. That is the binned version found in the 128GB and 256GB models, while the 512GB variant gets the full six-core A20 Pro. With the full chip, the multi-core gap would likely be smaller.
Image: Apple — https://www.apple.com/ipad-mini/
Compared with the previous model, the jump is substantial. Geekbench results attributed to the earlier iPad mini stand at 2,529 single-core and 6,741 multi-core points, which makes the new model about 53% faster in single-core and 46% faster in multi-core.
The tablet was announced this week, with pre-orders open at $699, €749 and £699, and sales starting November 6. The specifications describe an OLED panel, an IP67 body and iPadOS 27.
In practice, the iPad mini should open apps and browse as quickly as, or faster than, some pricier iPads. The difference could be more noticeable under heavier workloads such as video exports and rendering, where the extra CPU cores in the iPad Air 13 and iPad Pro 13 give them an advantage.
The Geekbench listing also shows 12GB of RAM, a figure MacRumors confirmed through Xcode 27.2 for the new iPad mini with A20 Pro. Apple does not list it in its official specifications.
The A20 Pro has already been the subject of similar tests: in an earlier article its single-core result beat several high-end desktop CPUs. The tablet is also the first in the line to move to OLED, as covered at the official announcement.
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