When it comes to performance, Apple’s M-series chips are no doubt among the best in the industry, as seen on the company’s newer desktops and laptop offerings from the past couple of years. With that in mind, the Cupertino tech giant recently announced the launch of its newest M4 SoC, which surprisingly made its debut on the latest iPad Pro 2024 model, instead of a laptop or desktop reveal. Speaking on the new chip, Johny Srouji, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies states:
“The new iPad Pro with M4 is a great example of how building best-in-class custom silicon enables breakthrough products… The power-efficient performance of M4, along with its new display engine, makes the thin design and game-changing display of iPad Pro possible, while fundamental improvements to the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and memory system make M4 extremely well suited for the latest applications leveraging AI. Altogether, this new chip makes iPad Pro the most powerful device of its kind.”
As such, Apple boasts a lot of improvements with the M4 chip, especially given the massive hype with its new iPads in terms of performance. But what exactly can we expect? Let’s take a look.
CPU and GPU Upgrades
According to Apple, the new M4 chip packs a significantly upgraded CPU which comes with up to 10 cores, including a combination of high-performance and efficiency cores. These all feature enhancements to overall processing power, as well as a significant leap with Apple’s machine learning accelerators. Compared to the M2, Apple claims that this yields up to a 1.5x CPU performance leap, making it ideal for tackling demanding software such as Logic Pro and LumaFusion.
The M4 chip likewise packs a 10-core GPU based on the M3 architecture. It features Dynamic Caching, which optimizes memory allocation for improved performance, and also supports ray tracing for more realistic visuals and graphics. Additionally, there’s also hardware-accelerated mesh shading which improves efficiency and allows for more complex scenes. Apple also claims that the M4 can deliver the same performance as the M2 with half the power consumption needed.
AI and Media Capabilities
Apple says that the M4 also features its next-generation Neural Engine, which is able to perform an impressive 38 trillion operations per second (60x faster than the original A11 Bionic chip), and can work seamlessly in tandem with the CPU, GPU, and high-bandwidth memory for AI-powered tasks. Certain use cases includes subject isolation in 4K videos with Final Cut Pro, automatic music notation in StaffPad to name a couple.
Additionally, the M4’s Media Engine is the best in an iPad so far – in addition to supporting popular video codecs like H.264, HEVC, and ProRes, it also comes with hardware acceleration for AV1 to iPad for the first time. This provides more power-efficient playback of high-resolution video and content from streaming services. In terms of display capabilities, the M4 also features an entirely new display engine for improved colour accuracy, and brightness uniformity of the Ultra Retina XDR display, as well as ProMotion support.
