Photo: Apple
Just seven months after the M3 chip made its debut, Apple shocked expectations by unveiling the new iPad Pro with introduction of the brand-new M4 chip. The M4 chip is built on second-generation three-nanometer technology that’s even more power efficient.
Tim Millet, Apple’s vice president of platform architecture and hardware technologies, says the M4 chip was “essential to deliver incredible performance” in the new iPad Pro, which is now “the most powerful device of its kind.”
The M4 chip was a last-minute rumor broken by Mark Gurman, which was dismissed by some as being unfeasible only half a year after M3 rolled out in last year’s MacBook Pro.
M4 introduction breaks all expectations
Image: Apple
The new CPU has the same number of four performance cores, but adds two new efficiency cores. M4 “ delivers up to 50% faster CPU performance than M2.” Every core has a next-generation ML accelerator that works alongside the Neural Engine.
The new GPU in the M4 chip makes it 4× faster than the previous iPad models with M2 and 10× faster than the original iPad Pro from 2015.
The new Neural Engine can process 38 trillion operations per second. Combined with “next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, a high-performance GPU and more memory bandwidth” Millet makes the bold claim that this Neural Engine is more powerful than any other PC neural processing unit.
Compared to the very first Apple silicon chip with a Neural Engine, the A11 Bionic — which debuted in 2017 — the M4 chip is 60× faster.
This article is still being updated with new information.