Apple today unveiled the next generation of Apple silicon, the M4 chip. The new processor comes just six months after the M3 chip powering the latest Mac models, powering the new OLED iPad Pro announced today.
The M4 is built on TSMC’s second-generation 3-nanometer process, an improvement over the first-generation 3nm technology powering the A17 Pro and M3 series of chips. The new chip includes an all-new display engine to drive the new Ultra Retina XDR display on the iPad Pro. The new CPU now features a new configuration of up to 10 cores, with four high-performance cores and six high-efficiency cores.
The M4 GPU builds upon that of the M3 chip, incorporating features like Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading. The new GPU, coupled with the higher memory bandwidth, allows the M4 to be four times as fast as the M2 when it comes to content rendering. The Neural Engine on the M4 receives a boost, now capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, while the unified memory bandwidth now reaches maximum speeds of 120GB/s. Overall, the M4 chip now sports over 28 billion transistors in total, compared to 25 billion on the M3.
Apple says the M4 CPU can deliver a performance boost of 1.5x when compared to the M2 chip. And thanks to the efficiency of the second-generation 3nm process, M4 can deliver the same performance as M2 while consuming just half the power. Just like the M3, the M4 chip includes an AV1 decoder, bringing efficient content streaming to the iPad Pro for the first time.
