M4 Chip, Image/Apple
Apple recently announced M4, its newest chip which powers the all-new iPad Pro. The new CPU has up to 10 cores and the new 10-core GPU expands features included in M3. The M4 is AI ready with faster memory bandwidth, next-generation machine learning (ML) accelerators in the CPU, and a high-performance GPU.
M4 is Apple’s fastest Neural Engine, producing up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is “faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today.”
The M4 chip enables the iPad Pro’s ultra thin design. The M4 enables exceptional precision, color, and brightness of the breakthrough Ultra Retina XDR display on iPad Pro. The new chip also brings Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading to the iPad.
The M4’s 10-core CPU is comprised of up to four performance cores and now six efficiency cores. M4 delivers up to 1.5x faster CPU performance versus the powerful M2:
The next-generation cores feature improved branch prediction, with wider decode and execution engines for the performance cores, and a deeper execution engine for the efficiency cores. And both types of cores also feature enhanced, next-generation ML accelerators.
Dynamic Caching, an Apple innovation that allocates local memory dynamically in hardware and in real time to dramatically increase the average utilization of the GPU. Hardware-accelerated ray tracing, an iPad first, creates realistic shadows and reflections in games and other graphical related experiences. Built-in hardware-accelerated mesh shading enables capability and efficiency in geometry processing, for more intricate scenes in games and similar type apps.
The M4 most powerful powerful Neural Engine ever is 60x faster than the first Neural Engine in A11 Bionic. M4’s next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, support AI features in iPadOS like Live Captions for real-time audio captions, and Visual Look Up, which identifies objects in video and photos.
The M4 can process AI with ease:
iPad Pro with M4 can easily isolate a subject from its background throughout a 4K video in Final Cut Pro with just a tap, and can automatically create musical notation in real time in StaffPad by simply listening to someone play the piano.
The Media Engine of M4 enables power-efficient playback of high-resolution video experiences from streaming services and supports the most popular video codecs, like H.264, HEVC, and ProRes, even hardware acceleration for AV1 to iPad.
The M4 delivers high standards for energy efficiency and includes all-day battery life. This results in less time to be plugged in and less lifetime energy consumed.
