CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA, May 7, 2024 — Today Apple announced M4, the latest chip that delivers the incredible performance of the all-new iPad Pro makes possible. M4 is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) built with second-generation 3-nanometer technology. With this new chip, Apple silicon becomes even more energy efficient. Moreover, it is entirely thanks to this chip that the iPad Pro has such an incredibly thin design. The M4 chip also features a completely new display engine, making images look incredibly accurate, clear and colorful on iPad Pro’s groundbreaking Ultra Retina XDR display. The new CPU has up to 10 cores, and the new 10-core GPU builds on M3’s advanced GPU architecture. This means you can benefit from dynamic caching, mesh shading and ray tracing with hardware acceleration for the first time on iPad. M4 has a Neural Engine that can handle a whopping 38 trillion operations per second. That’s faster than the neural processing unit in any available AI PC. Together with faster memory bandwidth, advanced ML accelerators in the CPU and a super-powerful GPU, M4 makes the new iPad Pro an unprecedentedly powerful device for AI.
“Apple’s chips power the most innovative products, and the new iPad Pro with M4 is a great example of that,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “It is entirely thanks to the energy-efficient M4 and the new display engine that the new iPad Pro is so thin and has such a groundbreaking display. In addition, the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine and memory system have been fundamentally improved, making M4 ideally suited for the latest apps that work with AI. All in all, thanks to this chip, the iPad Pro is the most powerful device of its kind.”
New technology in the new iPad Pro
M4 consists of 28 billion transistors built with second-generation 3-nanometer technology, making Apple silicon even more energy efficient and delivering a quantum leap in performance for the new iPad Pro over the previous version with M2. M4 is also equipped with a completely new, innovative display engine, which makes images look incredibly accurate, colorful and clear on the Ultra Retina XDR display. The light from two OLED panels is combined for this ultra-modern display.
New 10-core CPU
M4 has a new CPU with up to 10 cores, including four performance cores and now a whopping six efficiency cores. The advanced cores have improved branch prediction, larger decoding and execution engines for the performance cores and a deeper execution engine for the efficiency cores. In addition, both types of cores feature improved machine learning accelerators.
M4 delivers up to 1.5x faster CPU performance than the powerful M2 in the previous iPad Pro.2 Whether you want to edit complex orchestral music files in Logic Pro or add demanding effects to a 4K video in LumaFusion, M4 gives you the performance a big boost.
New possibilities with the GPU in iPad Pro
M4’s new 10-core GPU builds on the advanced graphics architecture of the M3 chips. The GPU features dynamic caching, an Apple innovation that allows local memory to be allocated dynamically and in real time on the hardware. As a result, the GPU can be used much better on average and the most demanding professional apps and games run a lot smoother.
For the first time, ray tracing with hardware acceleration is now possible on iPad, making shadows and reflections in games and other graphics-heavy elements look more realistic. Because mesh shading with hardware acceleration is also built into the GPU, geometric shapes are processed better and more efficiently, enabling more visually complex scenes in graphics-heavy games and apps. With M4, professional rendering in apps like Octane also gets a big boost: this is up to four times faster than with M2.1. With these improvements to the CPU and GPU, Apple silicon remains the industry leader when it comes to performance per watt. . M4 delivers the same performance as M2 and uses half as much power. And if you compare it to the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 delivers the same performance with only a quarter of the power.2
The most powerful Neural Engine
M4 has a lightning-fast Neural Engine, the IP block in the chip that ensures the acceleration of AI workloads. This is the most powerful Neural Engine Apple has developed to date, with up to 38 trillion operations per second. This makes it no less than 60 times as fast as the first Neural Engine in the A11 Bionic chip. Together with the advanced ML accelerators in the CPU, the super-powerful GPU and a central memory with more bandwidth, the Neural Engine makes M4 ideally suited for AI. And with AI features in iPadOS like Live Captions (generating audio captions in real time) and Visual Lookup (identifying objects in photos and videos), the new iPad Pro lets you perform amazing AI tasks at lightning speed, right on your device itself.
With M4, iPad Pro lets you pop a subject out of the background in a 4K video in Final Cut Pro with a single tap and automatically create real-time sheet music in StaffPad when you hear someone playing the piano. You can also handle inference tasks efficiently and safely without this consuming a lot of battery or memory or having major consequences for the response speed of the app. The Neural Engine in M4 is our most versatile yet and is more powerful than the neural processing unit in any AI PC on the market.
Advanced media engine for smooth and efficient streaming
M4’s media engine is the most advanced in iPad yet. It supports the most popular video codecs, such as H.264, HEVC and ProRes, and enables hardware acceleration for AV1 on iPad for the first time. This means it costs even less power to play high-resolution videos on streaming services.
Better for the environment
Thanks to the energy-efficient M4, the all-new iPad Pro meets Apple’s high energy efficiency standards and has all-day battery life. This means that you can go longer without charging and that this iPad Pro uses less power throughout its life cycle.
Currently, Apple’s global operations are carbon neutral, and by 2030 the company plans to achieve this across its entire manufacturing supply chain and the life cycle of each product.
Over Apple With the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, Apple unleashed a true revolution in personal technology. Today, Apple leads the world with its innovative iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro. Apple’s six software platforms (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, visionOS and tvOS) provide a seamless experience across all Apple devices and provide access to groundbreaking services such as the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, iCloud and Apple TV+. Apple’s more than 150,000 employees are committed to making the world’s best products and leaving the world a better place than it was.
This article is a submitted article and is beyond the responsibility of the editors.
