Apple surprised us with an M4 announcement at its iPad event.
The new 3nm chip will be in the company’s newly announced iPad Pro. The company touted major improvements to performance, architecture and graphics.
The M4 boasts a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, which builds on what Apple did with the M3 chip. The company highlighted the M4’s Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh sharing, which are now available on an iPad for the first time.
Dynamic Caching, which the company describes as an “Apple innovation,” dynamically allocates local memory in hardware and in real-time to increase GPU utilization, leading to improved performance in apps and games.
The CPU sports four performance cores and six efficiency cores, often dubbed p- and e-cores. And the M4’s use of second-gen 3nm technology further boosts the chip’s efficiency. Apple says the M4 offers 1.5x faster CPU performance compared to the M2 in the last iPad Pro. On the efficiency side, M4 can deliver the same performance as M2 while using half the power. Apple says that compared to the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 delivers the same performance using a quarter of the power (per fine print on Apple’s news release, the company used an Asus Zenbook 14 OLED with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H chip and 32GB of RAM for the comparison).
Apple touted the M4’s AI capabilities thanks to an improved Neural Engine (Apple’s name for the chip’s neural processing unit, or NPU). The tech giant claims the NPU is 60 times faster than its original Neural Engine and significantly ahead of the NPUs available in AI PCs. Apple called its M4 Neural Engine the “fastest Neural Engine ever.”
Other interesting details about the M4 include an improved Media Engine that supports popular video codecs like H.264, HEVC and Apple’s own ProRes. The Media Engine also brings hardware acceleration for AV1 to Ipad for the first time.
All of our Apple ‘Let Loose’ iPad event content can be found here.
Header image credit: Apple
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