At today’s iPad-focused event, Apple unveiled the brand new M4 chip, which is powering the new iPad Pro, just as a rumor from last week anticipated. The M4 comes with Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which Apple says is “faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today”, whatever that means.
The point, of course, is that the M4 “makes the new iPad Pro an outrageously powerful device for artificial intelligence”, since 2024 has long been rumored to be the year when Apple finally enters AI Buzzwordland.
The M4 has up to 10 CPU cores, of which 4 are performance cores and 6 are efficiency cores. The CPU is billed as being 1.5x faster than the M2 in the previous iPad Pro from 2022, but there’s conspicuously no comparison to the M3. The chip is built on a second-generation 3nm process, and comes with an entirely new display engine which has tandem OLED support and 10Hz-120Hz ProMotion support.
The GPU has 10 cores and hardware-accelerated ray tracing, along with hardware-accelerated mesh shading. M4 is said to deliver the same performance as M2 using just half the power, and the same performance as “the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop” using just a fourth of the power (the laptop in question is the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405MA with Core Ultra 7 155H and 32GB of RAM, in case you were wondering).
The M4 has support for hardware acceleration of the AV1 codec, in addition to H.264, HEVC, and ProRes. According to recent rumors, there will be M4-powered Macs too, coming later this year.