The Apple M processor family, which first appeared in 2020 in MacBook Air and Mac mini, today enters its fourth generation. The Apple Silicon M4 processor is now official, promising a “huge leap forward in performance” and a significant focus on AI. Interestingly, Apple decided to use the iPad Pro as the launch platform for the M4 chip, while all current Mac models are powered by the M2 and M3 chips and their variants.
Apple claims that the new M4 chip is built using a second-generation 3nm process (28 billion transistors) to deliver Apple’s unique energy efficiency and performance, especially for thin devices, such as the new 5.1mm iPad Pro. Besides a notable performance improvement For everyday tasks, the M4 focuses on AI-based processing with the ability to deliver up to 38 trillion operations per second.
As usual, Apple slams PCs by claiming that the M4 is faster than any AI computer available today. That may change soon, as Microsoft, Qualcomm and other companies prepare to launch new computers with Snapdragon X.
The Apple M4 processor is available in several configurations in the new iPad Pro, which is somewhat unusual for this category of device. Customers can choose between the following models:
| 256GB | 512GB | 1TB | 2TB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | 9 core processor 3 performance cores and 6 efficient cores |
10 core processor 4 performance cores and 6 efficient cores |
||
| GPU | GPU 10 cores | |||
| RAM | 8GB 120GB/s | 16GB 120GB/s | ||
| NPU | 16-core neural engine | |||
According to Apple, the M4 processor includes next-generation cores with better branch prediction, broader decoding and execution engines, and a deeper execution engine for efficient cores. Apple has also improved its ML accelerators for better AI processing on the device.
In terms of performance, customers can expect about a 50% increase in CPU horsepower compared to the M2 processor. Interestingly, Apple does not mention the M3 processor, which suggests that the difference in performance is less impressive. Exact performance differences and improvements will be available next week once the first buyers receive their iPad Pro tablets.
On the GPU side, M4 promises new technology for iPad users, such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing (first appearing in the M3), hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and more.
As for the NPU (Apple calls it a “neural engine”), customers can look for better AI processing thanks to a dedicated on-chip block for accelerating AI workloads. These include real-time audio captioning, object detection through the camera, real-time musical score generation, object isolation, and more. Again, Apple says its neural engine in the M4 is more capable than any NPU in modern Windows PCs.
Finally, iPads with the M4 chip now support AV1 hardware acceleration for more efficient playback of high-resolution videos.