The M4 Pro performance downgrade no one is talking about

I’ve spent this whole week testing the new M4 chip, specifically the M4 Pro in both the Mac mini and 16-inch MacBook Pro. They are fantastic, impressive chips, but in my testing, I noticed something pretty surprising about the way they run that I haven’t seen others talk much about. I’m talking about the pretty significant change Apple made in this generation to power modes.

First off, Apple has extended the different power modes to the “Pro” level chips for the first time, having kept it as an exclusive for Max in the past. The three power modes, found in System Settings, are the following: Low Power, Automatic, and High Power. The interesting thing, however, is that in my testing, the Low Power drops performance far more this time around.

The scores shown above came from on the M4 Pro Mac mini in Cinebench R24. The difference between modes in single-core is closer to what I’d expect, and closer to what they’ve been in previous generations. We’re looking at a 13% higher score for the High Power mode than the Low Power mode.

Multi-core is where things get wild though. With the M4 Pro, you can see just how big of a disparity there is when running the system in Low Power. This Mac mini is 55% faster in High Power than in Low Power. That’s not much higher than the scores we see on the base M3 or M1 Pro chips. This massive drop in performance is also present on the M4 Pro MacBook Pro.

For comparison’s sake, I ran this same test on the previous-gen M3 Max MacBook Pro. There, the High Power mode is only 33% faster in multi-core performance than in Low Power. In fact, although the M4 Pro gets an 8% faster score in multi-core than the M3 Max in High Power mode, the M3 Max is actually 27% faster in Low Power mode.

Of course, this won’t cause any wonky…