Apple Silicon M4 chipset, which debuted on the 2024 iPad Pro.
Apple knew what it was doing when it led the 2024 iPad Pro’s announcement by saying that the previous generation had the Apple M2 chipset. They were skipping a grade by blazing past M3 to introduce the new Apple M4 chipset via this year's pro-grade tablets.
Sure, this info nugget was leaked about a week before the new tablets were officially released, but it was also shrugged off as a wild rumour. We now know that it’s real, and not as wild as previously assumed.
Here’s the down-low about what the M4 Apple Silicon offers.
New and powerful
Summary of the specs available for Apple's M4 chipset.
A new generation of chipsets typically begets performance gains, but gains are nothing if they aren’t implemented with practicality in mind.
M4 uses a second-generation 3nm manufacturing technology, which favours power efficiency. This means the same performance from an older chip would demand less battery power with the M4.
Compared to the M2 chipset, Apple said the M4 grants 1.5x faster CPU performance, 4x faster pro-rendering performance for its GPU, and delivers the same M2 performance with half the required power.
M4’s CPU layout sees 10 cores: four performance cores (for demanding workloads) and six efficiency cores. All the cores are also accelerated with machine learning to milk more performance.
The GPU component also has 10 cores, but Dynamic Caching is new. It effectively allocates hardware memory in real time, increasing the average GPU utilization. This means the graphics processor is better utilised in graphically demanding apps, like games and pro editing tools. The GPU also gets hardware-accelerated ray tracing for more realistic rendering of in-game shadows and reflections.
The Neural Engine (Apple’s nomenclature for its neural processing unit that handles AI workloads) on the M4 can go up to 38 trillion operations per second. For context, that’s 60x faster than Apple’s A11 Bionic (which debuted in 2017 and was already ahead of its time).
Perhaps it’s odd that Apple made the M4 comparison to a relatively old chipset, but we believe it’s a deliberate attempt to showcase Apple’s approach to AI long before the AI bandwagon.
The Media Engine (codec processing unit) on M4 introduces AV1 hardware acceleration for the first time.
Of course, much of the processing power enables some new features on the new iPad Pro, which you can read more about here.
Source: Apple (newsroom)
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