Apple at its ‘Let Loose’ event announced M4, the company’s new ARM-based SoC, as the successor to the M3 series that was introduced back in October last year. It uses second generation 3-nanometer process technology, and has over 28 billion transistors. It offers up to 120 GB/s unified memory bandwidth.
The M4 has up to 10-core CPU, with up to 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. It delivers up to 50% faster CPU performance than the M2. It has a 10-core GPU is up to 4x faster than the M2 and has features like Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, which come to iPad for the first time.
The chip features an entirely new display engine that promises stunning precision, color accuracy, and brightness uniformity of the Ultra Retina XDR display, a state-of-the-art display created by combining the light of two OLED panels.
Coupled with higher unified memory bandwidth, pro rendering apps like Octane will see up to 4x faster performance than M2, said the company.
Compared to M2, M4 can deliver the same performance using just half the power, and compared to the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a quarter of the power, said Apple.
The M4 Neural Engine is capable of an 38 trillion operations per second, 60x faster than the first Neural Engine in the A11 Bionic.
Availability
The Apple M4 will power the new iPad Pro that was introduced today. We can expect more M4 chips to join later this year, powering the MacBooks.