Apple M4 chip
The new iPad Pro’s innovative design and breathtaking display are made possible by M4, which also offers a massive performance boost.
M4 chip release date
On May 7, 2024, Apple formally unveiled the M4 chip together with the new iPad Pro. Sadly, for the moment, it is limited to the iPad Pro. We’ll probably have to wait until later this year or even early 2025 for Macs and MacBooks.
Apple M4 chip, the newest chip that powers the revolutionary iPad Pro with incredible performance. The M4 system-on-a-chip (SoC), which was created using second-generation 3-nanometer technology, improves Apple silicon’s industry-leading power efficiency and makes the iPad Pro’s extraordinarily thin design possible. In order to power the astounding accuracy, colour, and brightness of the ground-breaking Ultra Retina XDR display on iPad Pro, it also has a completely new display engine.
Up to 10 cores may be found in a new CPU, while the 10-core GPU expands upon the next-generation GPU architecture seen in the M3, introducing hardware-accelerated mesh shading, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and dynamic caching to the iPad for the first time. With a maximum speed of 38 trillion operations per second, the M4 has Apple’s fastest neural engine ever, surpassing the neural processing unit found in any AI PC on the market today.
The next-generation machine learning (ML) accelerators in the CPU, a high-performance GPU, and higher memory bandwidth, together with the Apple M4 chip, make the new iPad Pro an incredibly potent artificial intelligence tool.
“Creating best-in-class custom silicon enables breakthrough products,” stated Johny Srouji, senior vice president of Hardware Technologies at Apple, “and the new iPad Pro with M4″ The iPad Pro’s innovative display and thin design are made possible by the M4’s power-efficient performance and new display engine, while significant upgrades to the CPU, GPU, memory system, and neural engine make the M4 ideally suited for the newest AI-enabled applications. The iPad Pro is now the most powerful gadget of its kind thanks to this latest CPU.
Novel Technologies Activating the Latest iPad Pro
The M4 iPad Pro offers a significant improvement in performance compared to the M2 model. It is composed of 28 billion transistors, which are constructed with a second-generation 3-nanometer technology, hence increasing the power efficiency of Apple silicon. The Ultra Retina XDR display, a cutting-edge display made possible by mixing the light of two OLED panels, has remarkable precision, colour accuracy, and brightness uniformity thanks to an all-new display engine built using cutting-edge technology included in the M4.
A new CPU with ten cores
The new Apple M4 chip features up to 10 cores, with four performance cores and six efficiency cores. With deeper execution engines for efficiency cores and wider decode and execution engines for performance cores, the next-generation cores provide better branch prediction. Additionally, improved, next-generation ML accelerators are a characteristic of both types of cores.
Compared to the potent M2 in the previous iPad Pro, the Apple M4 chip offers up to 1.5 times faster CPU performance. M4 improves performance across professional workflows, whether utilizing Logic Pro to work with intricate orchestral music files or LumaFusion to add challenging effects to 4K video.
GPU Gives the iPad Pro New Features
The next-generation graphics architecture of the M3 family of processors is expanded upon by the new 10-core GPU of the Apple M4 chip. It has Apple’s revolutionary Dynamic Caching, which significantly raises the average GPU utilization by dynamically allocating local memory in real time and hardware. Performance for even the most demanding pro apps and games is greatly improved by this.
iPad hardware-accelerated ray tracing adds lifelike reflections and shadows to games and other visually exciting material for the first time. The GPUs hardware accelerated mesh shading speeds geometry processing and supports more graphically sophisticated scenes in games and graphics-intensive applications. Apple M4 chip significantly improves pro rendering speed, which is now up to four times faster than on M2, in tools such as Octane. The CPU and GPU enhancements in M4 preserve Apple silicon’s industry-best performance per watt. With only half the power, M4 can perform at par with M2. Additionally, the M4 requires only a quarter of the power to achieve the same performance as the newest PC processor in a light and thin laptop.
The fastest neural engine ever found in an IP block specifically designed to accelerate AI workloads is found in the Most Powerful Neural Engine Ever the M4. With a staggering 38 trillion operations per second, or 60 times faster than the first neural engine in the A11 Bionic, this is Apple’s most powerful neural engine ever. The Neural Engine in the Apple M4 chip creates an incredibly potent chip for AI, especially when combined with the high-performance GPU, higher-bandwidth unified memory, and next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU.
Additionally, the new iPad Pro enables users to complete incredible AI tasks quickly and on-device thanks to iPadOS AI features like Live Captions, which provides real-time audio captions, and Visual Look Up, which recognises items in images and videos.
With just a tap, the iPad Pro with Apple M4 chip can tap-freely separate a subject from the background of a 4K film in Final Cut Pro, and by listening to a piano performance in StaffPad, it can automatically write musical notation in real time. Additionally, inference workloads can be completed effectively and discreetly with the least amount of negative effects on battery life, app memory, and app performance. More potent than any neural processing unit found in any AI PC on the market today, the M4’s neural engine is Apple’s most powerful to date.
Cutting-Edge Media Engine for Fluid, Effective Streaming
The most sophisticated Media Engine available for iPad is found in the M4. It not only supports the most widely used video codecs, such as H.264, HEVC, and ProRes, but it also introduces hardware acceleration for AV1 to the iPad a first. This enables streaming services to play back high-definition videos with greater power efficiency.
More Beneficial to the Environment
Apple has high requirements for energy economy, and the all-new iPad Pro meets those standards and offers all-day battery life thanks to the power-efficient performance of Apple M4 chip. As a result, it requires less time to be plugged in and uses less energy overall in its lifetime.
Apple is currently carbon neutral for worldwide corporate operations and expects to be so by 2030 for its manufacturing supply chain and product life cycle.
