Apple announces new M4 chip built on 2nd gen 3-nm process for improved power efficiency

Apple today announced M4, its latest chip built on TSMC’s 2nd gen 3-nm process to delvier industry-leading power efficiency. This new M4 chip will be shipping first as part of the new redesigned iPad Pro which was announced today.

The M4 chip new display engine, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU and a new NPU (Neural Engine) that can deliver up to 38 TOPS. You can read about them in detail below.

• The M4 consists of 28 billion transistors.
• The new display engine enables more precision, color accuracy, and brightness uniformity of the Ultra Retina XDR display, a new display available on the iPad Pro that combines the light of two OLED panels.
• The 10-core CPU consists of up to four performance cores and now six efficiency cores. These new cores feature improved branch prediction, with wider decode and execution engines for the performance cores, and a deeper execution engine for the efficiency cores. Next-generation ML accelerators are available in both the core types.
• The new 10-core GPU of M4 features Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing and hardware-accelerated mesh shading.
• M4 has an updated Neural Engine capable of 38 TOPS (trillion operations per second).
• The Media Engine of M4 supports H.264, HEVC, and ProRes. Also, it brings hardware acceleration for AV1 to iPad for the first time.

Apple also highlighted that M4 with 10-core CPU and 16GB RAM can deliver the same performance of Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and 32GB of RAM using just a fourth of the power.

“The new iPad Pro with M4 is a great example of how building best-in-class custom silicon enables breakthrough products,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “The power-efficient performance of M4, along with its new display engine, makes the thin design and game-changing display of iPad Pro possible, while fundamental improvements to the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and memory system make M4 extremely well suited for the latest applications leveraging AI. Altogether, this new chip makes iPad Pro the most powerful device of its kind.”