"Apple Unveils Revolutionary M4 Pro and M4 Max Chips: Unmatched Speed and Performance for Mac Users"

“Apple chips have shaped the Mac like never before, and with the new M4 Pro and M4 Max we’re keeping the pace of innovation sharp,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president. for hardware technology, he did not hide his passion for the news.

According to him, these are “the fastest CPU cores in the world”, which include “a much more powerful GPU and the fastest Neural Engine ever”. “The chips of the M4 family, with their performance, economy and options, increase their lead as the most advanced series of chips on the market,” said Srouji.

Although we have to wait some time for real practical tests that confirm his words, the limits of the news are very interesting. All chips are based on second generation 3-nanometer technology, which increases their performance and economy.

The increase in performance compared to previous generations of M series chips should be noticeable in single-threaded and multi-threaded applications.

For example, the basic M4 chip, which appears in Apple-branded computers for the first time ever, has up to 10 CPU cores, with four performance cores and up to six economy cores . According to Apple representatives, it is up to 1.8 times faster than the M1. The 10-core GPU provides up to twice the graphics performance of the M1, which you can see when editing photos and playing the latest games.

The 16-core Neural Engine, which takes care of running Apple Intelligence, ie the latest AI functions from Apple, is also faster. The M4 supports up to 32 GB of integrated memory and offers a throughput of 120 GB / s. Although this is the basic chip from the quad series, it manages two external displays in addition to the integrated display.

The M4 Pro chip is for more demanding users. In particular, Apple says it should offer enough performance for researchers, developers, designers, creative professionals and other users with more demanding workflows.

Up to 14-core CPU of the M4 Pro chip includes up to 10 performance cores and four energy saving cores. It is up to 1.9 times faster than the CPU in the M1 Pro and up to 2.1 times faster than the latest AI PC chip. The up to 20-core GPU has double the graphics performance of the M4 chip and is up to 2.4 times faster than the latest AI PC chip.

The M4 Pro supports up to 64 GB of fast integrated memory with a throughput of 273 GB / s. Interestingly, there is a 75 percent increase in output compared to the M3 Pro chip, which is a huge leap. Combined with the faster Neural Engine of the M4 family of chips, this allows Apple Intelligence models on the device to run even faster at high speed.

In addition, the M4 Pro will support Thunderbolt 5 to Mac with transfer speeds of up to 120 Gbps – more than double that of Thunderbolt 4.

The M4 Max is the flagship of Apple’s new chip family. This high-performance processor is designed for data scientists, 3D artists, or composers who need to push their computer to the limits.

The M4 Max chip has up to a 16-core CPU with up to 12 performance cores and four economy cores. It is up to 2.2 times faster than the CPU in the M1 Max and up to 2.5 times faster than the latest AI PC chip. The 40-core GPU is up to 1.9 times faster than the GPU in the M1 Max and even up to 4 times faster than the latest AI PC chip.

Even demanding tasks, such as removing noise from raw video footage in DaVinci Resolve Studio, can run in real time on a computer with the M4 Max.

The M4 Max supports up to 128GB of fast integrated memory with a throughput of 546GB/s, which is four times higher than the latest AI PC chip. “Such developers can easily work with large language modules that have almost 200 billion parameters,” emphasized Apple representatives.

“The advanced media engine in the M4 Max chip has two video coding engines and two ProRes accelerators, so it is very suitable for professional video work,” they added to one of the other advantages. In fact, the M4 Max supports Thunderbolt 5, just like the M4 Pro, with a data transfer rate of up to 120 Gb / s.

The new chips were shown by Apple on Wednesday as part of “release week”, when the American technology giant reveals something new every day since the beginning of the week. On Monday, the new all-in-one iMac line was unveiled for the first time, followed by the small Mac mini computer on Tuesday.

Both new items are already available for pre-order, sales will begin on Friday, November 8.

Prices for the iMac start at CZK 39,990 for the basic configuration with 16GB of operating memory and a 256GB SSD drive. The Mac mini will also be offered in several configurations, the basic one starting at CZK 17,490. For that price, people get an M4 chip, 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

Whether we get any exciting news on Thursday remains to be seen…