Apple today announced M4, its latest chip built using second-generation 3-nanometer technology. The system on a chip (SoC) has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today.
M4 promises faster memory bandwidth, next-generation machine learning (ML) accelerators, and a high-performance GPU, making it great for artificial intelligence.
New Technologies Enabling the New iPad Pro
The M4 consists of 28 billion transistors built using a second-generation 3-nanometer technology with advanced power efficiency.
New 10-core CPU
M4 comes with up-to-10-core CPU consisting of up to 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores and delivers up to 1.5x faster CPU performance over the powerful M2 in the previous iPad Pro.
GPU Brings New Capabilities to iPad Pro
The new 10-core GPU of M4 builds upon the next-generation graphics architecture of the M3 family of chips. It features Dynamic Caching, allocating local memory dynamically in hardware and in real time to dramatically increase the average utilization of the GPU. This significantly increases performance for the most demanding pro apps and games.
The new GPU of M4 will bring hardware-accelerated ray tracing to iPad for the first time, enabling even more realistic shadows and reflections in games like Diablo Immortal, and other graphically rich experiences.
Hardware-accelerated ray tracing comes to iPad for the first time, and enables even more realistic shadows and reflections in games and other graphically rich experiences. Hardware-accelerated mesh shading is also built into the GPU, and delivers greater capability and efficiency in geometry processing, enabling more visually complex scenes in games and graphics-intensive apps. Pro rendering performance in apps like Octane gets a huge boost with M4, and is now up to four times faster than on M2. M4 can deliver the same performance as M2 using just half the power.
M4 has a blazing-fast Neural Engine — an IP block in the chip dedicated to the acceleration of AI workloads. This is Apple’s most powerful Neural Engine ever, capable of an astounding 38 trillion operations per second — a breathtaking 60x faster than the first Neural Engine in A11 Bionic. Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI. And with AI features in iPadOS like Live Captions for real-time audio captions, and Visual Look Up, which identifies objects in video and photos, the new iPad Pro allows users to accomplish amazing AI tasks quickly and on device.
iPad Pro with M4 can easily isolate a subject from its background throughout a 4K video in Final Cut Pro with just a tap, and can automatically create musical notation in real time in StaffPad by simply listening to someone play the piano. And inference workloads can be done efficiently and privately while minimizing the impact on app memory, app responsiveness, and battery life. The Neural Engine in M4 is Apple’s most capable yet, and is more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC today.
M4 has a blazing-fast Neural Engine that can easily isolate a subject from its background throughout a 4K video in Final Cut Pro with just a tap.