Apple Announces M4 Chip

Apple announced the fourth iteration of their main system on a chip (SoC) with the M4, which will be present in their new iPad Pros, in their recently concluded May 2024 Keynote, promising performance leaps over their previous SoC.

The tech giant said that the new chip is built on a second-generation 3-nanometer technology and boasts an entirely new display engine for the new Ultra Retina XDR display which will be a feature of the iPad Pro.

Moreover, the M4 chip also features a CPU with up to 10 cores, with, according to Apple, an improved architecture for both performance and efficiency cores.

Apple also claims the M4 delivers “up to 1.5x faster CPU performance over the powerful M2 in the previous iPad Pro.”

“The new iPad Pro with M4 is a great example of how building best-in-class custom silicon enables breakthrough products,” Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, said, adding “The power-efficient performance of M4, along with its new display engine, makes the thin design and game-changing display of iPad Pro possible.”

The M4 also sports a 10-core GPU based on the architecture introduced in the M3 chip family. This new GPU brings features like Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading to the iPad for the first time, with Apple saying that the features are designed to improve graphics performance in professional applications and games.

The Neural Engine also gets an update according to Apple, as the M4’s Neural Engine is now touted to be capable of 38 trillion operations per second, with Apple saying “combined with faster memory bandwidth, along with next-generation machine learning (ML) accelerators in the CPU, and a high-performance GPU, M4 makes the new iPad Pro an outrageously powerful device for artificial intelligence.”

Furthermore, the M4 also features an advanced Media Engine that supports the latest video codecs, including H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and for the first time on iPad, the open-source AV1. This expanded codec support is designed to allow for more power-efficient streaming of high-resolution videos.

YouTube is one notable platform using the AV1 codec now. (GFB)