Apple Reveals M4 Chip For iPad Pro: New Features

Today, Apple launched the M4, the newest processor that powers the revolutionary iPad Pro with incredible performance. Utilizing second-generation 3-nanometer technology, the M4 system-on-a-chip (SoC) enhances the industry-leading power efficiency of Apple silicon and enables the very thin design of the iPad Pro. It also boasts an entirely new display engine that powers the incredible brightness, color, and clarity of the revolutionary Ultra Retina XDR display on iPad Pro.

While the 10-core GPU builds upon the next-generation GPU architecture seen in the M3, it brings hardware-accelerated ray tracing, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and dynamic caching to the iPad for the first time. New CPUs may have up to 10 cores.

Efficiency of M4 Chip for iPad Pro:

The M4 has Apple’s fastest neural engine to date, capable of doing up to 38 trillion operations per second, which outpaces the neural processing unit utilized by any AI PC available today. The M4 processor, along with the next-generation machine learning (ML) accelerators inside the CPU, high-performance GPU, and increased memory bandwidth, combine to make the new iPad Pro an extraordinarily powerful artificial intelligence tool.

According to Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, Johny Srouji, “The new iPad Pro with M4 is a wonderful example of how developing best-in-class specialized silicon activates ground-breaking devices”.

The M4’s power-efficient performance and new display engine enable the iPad Pro’s unique display and thin design, while substantial improvements to the CPU, GPU, and memory system make the M4 incredibly well-suited for the newest AI-enabled applications. With this new chip together, the iPad Pro is now the most powerful gadget of its kind.

New Display Enabling the New iPad Pro

Comparing the M2 variant of the iPad Pro with the M4 model reveals a notable performance gain. This increases the power efficiency of Apple silicon. It is made up of 28 billion transistors that are built using second-generation 3-nanometer technology.

Because of an entirely new display engine constructed with cutting-edge technology incorporated in the M4, the Ultra Retina XDR display, a state-of-the-art display made possible by combining the light of two OLED panels has amazing precision, color accuracy, and brightness uniformity.

New 10-core CPU

Up to four performance cores and six efficiency cores make up the new, up to 10-core CPU found in the M4. With broader decoding and execution engines for performance cores and a deeper execution engine for efficiency cores, the next-generation cores will have better branch prediction. Better, next-generation ML accelerators are also a feature of both kinds of cores.

The M4 chip outperforms the M2 in the previous iPad Pro by up to 1.5 times in terms of CPU performance. M4 improves performance throughout pro workflows, whether modifying intricate orchestral music files in Logic Pro or applying extremely demanding effects to 4K video in LumaFusion.

GPU Brings New Capabilities to iPad Pro

The new 10-core GPU of the M4 expands upon the next-generation graphics architecture of the M3 series of CPUs. It has Apple’s revolutionary Dynamic Caching, which significantly raises the average GPU usage by dynamically allocating local memory in hardware and real-time. For the most demanding pro programs and games, this greatly improves performance.

For the iPad, hardware-accelerated ray tracing is now possible for the first time, enabling even more realistic reflections and shadows in visual-rich content like games.

Additionally integrated within the GPU is hardware-accelerated mesh shading, which improves geometry processing speed and capabilities to support more graphically complex scenes in games and graphics-intensive applications. M4 significantly improves pro rendering speed, which is now up to four times quicker than on M2, in tools such as Octane.

The improvements in CPU and GPU seen in M4 maintain the industry-best performance per watt of Apple hardware. M4 can function on par with M2, even with half the power. Moreover, the M4 achieves the same efficiency as the latest PC CPU with a quarter of the power consumption in a small, light notebook.

The Most Powerful Neural Engine Ever

An artificial intelligence (AI) application may operate more quickly thanks to the M4 processor’s lightning-fast Neural Engine IP block. Apple’s strongest neural engine to date, it can do an astounding 38 trillion operations per second. Compared to the A11 Bionic’s initial neural engine, it is 60 times quicker.

The M4 is a very powerful SoC for AI thanks to the Neural Engine, next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, higher-bandwidth unified memory, and a high-performance GPU. Additionally, the new iPad Pro enables users to rapidly and on-device complete remarkable AI tasks thanks to iPadOS AI capabilities like Live Captions, which provides real-time audio captions, and objects in movies and photos can be identified using Visual Look Up.

A single tap on an iPad Pro with M4 can instantaneously generate musical notation in StaffPad by listening to someone play the piano, and it can also effortlessly separate a subject from its backdrop in a 4K film in Final Cut Pro. Moreover, inference-related tasks may be finished efficiently and discretely with the least amount of negative impacts on responsiveness, app memory, and battery life. Apple’s Neural Engine, which drives the M4, is the most powerful neural processing unit found in any AI PC available today.

Advanced Media Engine for Smooth and Efficient Streaming

The most sophisticated Media Engine available for iPad is the one found in the M4. It makes hardware acceleration for AV1 available on the iPad for the first time, in addition to supporting the most widely used video codecs, such as H.264, HEVC, and ProRes. Higher-resolution video experiences from streaming sources may now be played back more power-efficiently.

Better for the Environment

The all-new iPad Pro satisfies Apple’s strict energy efficiency requirements and offers all-day battery life thanks to the power-efficient M4 performance. As a result, it has to be plugged in for shorter periods of time and uses less energy overall. Apple aims to achieve carbon neutrality throughout the full manufacturing supply chain and product life cycle by 2030, building on its current status as a carbon neutral global corporation.