The new Apple M4 chip

The new iPad Pro features the M4 chip, which powers its revolutionary design and spectacular display. This chip represents a huge leap in performance.

"The new iPad Pro with the M4 chip is a prime example of how first-class chip design can lead to truly revolutionary products," comments Johny Srouji, Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies at Apple. "The energy efficiency of the M4 chip, combined with its innovative display engine, has made possible the slim design and pioneering display of the iPad Pro. Furthermore, the significant enhancements implemented in its CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and memory system provide the M4 chip with all the capabilities necessary to run the most advanced applications leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. In summary, this new chip makes the iPad Pro the most powerful device in its category."

Today, Apple announced the launch of the impressive M4 chip designed for the new iPad Pro, promising exceptional performance. Manufactured using second-generation 3-nanometer technology, the M4 is a system-on-chip (SoC) that not only delivers industry-leading energy efficiency in Apple`s chip lineup but also enables the incredibly slim design of the iPad Pro.

This new chip features a completely revamped display engine that provides unparalleled precision, dazzling brightness, and vibrant colors to the revolutionary Ultra Retina XDR display of the iPad Pro. The M4 boasts a CPU with up to 10 cores and a 10-core GPU based on the latest-generation GPU architecture of the M3 chip. This new GPU introduces hardware-accelerated ray tracing and Mesh Shading to the iPad for the first time, along with Dynamic Caching.

Additionally, the M4 chip is equipped with Apple`s fastest Neural Engine to date, capable of performing up to 38 trillion operations per second. This makes it the fastest neural processor available in any artificial intelligence device on the current market. Combined with faster memory bandwidth, state-of-the-art machine learning accelerators in the CPU, and a high-performance GPU, the M4 chip transforms the new iPad Pro into an exceptionally powerful device for artificial intelligence applications.

The new technologies behind the new iPad Pro

The M4 chip represents a significant leap in performance compared to its predecessor, the previous iPad Pro with the M2 chip. With 28 billion transistors designed using second-generation 3-nanometer technology, the M4 chip takes Apple`s chip energy efficiency to a new level. Additionally, the M4 chip incorporates a completely new display engine, developed with innovative technologies, which enhances the incredible sharpness, color accuracy, and brightness uniformity of the Ultra Retina XDR display. This next-generation display is achieved through the combination of light from two OLED panels.

New 10-core CPU

The M4 chip features a new CPU with up to 10 cores, including four high-performance cores and, for the first time, six efficiency cores. These next-generation cores boast improved branch prediction, with wider decode and execution engines for the high-performance cores, and an optimized execution engine for the efficiency cores. Additionally, both types of cores are equipped with advanced machine learning accelerators.

Compared to the powerful M2 chip in the previous iPad Pro, the M4 chip offers CPU performance up to 1.5 times faster. In demanding applications such as working with complex music files in Logic Pro or adding intensive effects to 4K videos in LumaFusion, the M4 chip enhances performance in all professional tasks.

The GPU brings new capabilities to the iPad Pro.

The new 10-core GPU of the M4 chip is based on the advanced graphics architecture of the M3 chip family. It introduces Dynamic Caching, an Apple innovation that dynamically assigns local memory in real time on the hardware to significantly increase average GPU utilization. This results in a substantial performance boost in demanding games and professional applications.

Hardware-accelerated ray tracing, present for the first time on the iPad, enables even more realistic shadows and reflections in games and other experiences with advanced graphics. Additionally, Mesh Shading, also hardware-accelerated, is integrated into the GPU to provide even more capacity and efficiency in geometric processing, allowing for the creation of visually more complex scenes in games and graphics-intensive applications.

The performance of professional rendering in applications like Octane sees a significant leap with the M4 chip, being up to four times faster than with the M2 chip. These improvements in CPU and GPU enable the M4 chip to maintain leadership in performance per watt in Apple`s chip industry. The M4 chip can deliver the same performance as the M2 chip while consuming half the energy, and compared to the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, the M4 chip can deliver the same performance using a quarter of the energy.

The most powerful Neural Engine ever

The M4 chip is equipped with an exceptionally fast Neural Engine, an IP block designed to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. This is the most powerful Neural Engine ever developed by Apple to date, capable of performing 38 trillion operations per second. To put it into perspective, it is 60 times faster than the first Neural Engine built into the A11 Bionic chip. Along with the latest-generation machine learning accelerators in the CPU, high-performance GPU, and increased bandwidth of unified memory, the Neural Engine makes the M4 chip a powerhouse for artificial intelligence.

With AI features in iPadOS, such as Live Captions, which provides real-time audio captions, and Visual Lookup, which identifies objects in videos and photos, the new iPad Pro enables remarkable AI tasks to be performed quickly and directly on the device.

The iPad Pro with the M4 chip can easily separate a subject from the background in a 4K video in Final Cut Pro with a single touch or transcribe a score in real-time in StaffPad simply by listening to someone play the piano. Additionally, the inference process is carried out efficiently and privately, minimizing the impact on memory, application response, and battery life. The Neural Engine of the M4 chip is the most advanced ever created by Apple and surpasses in power any neural processing unit available in PC with AI on the market.

Publication Date: 2024-05-11

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