- Kyle Chua
Apple Unveils M4 Chip Featuring 10-Core CPU, New Neural Engine
Apple's latest silicon is supposedly "an outrageously powerful chip" for artificial intelligence (AI) tasks.
The iPhone maker at its Let Loose event unveiled the M4, the latest iteration of its M-series of chips that power its MacBook laptops and iPad tablets. The new chip is built using second-generation three-nanometre technology, enabling it to push the envelope on performance and power efficiency on thin and light devices. It'll be debuting on the new iPad Pro, which is the thinnest Apple product yet.
The M4 features an entirely new display engine design that powers the Ultra Retina XDR display of the new iPad Pro. Apple touts that the new engine delivers stunning precision, colour accuracy and brightness uniformity.
Meanwhile, the chip has a new up-to-10-core CPU consisting of up to four performance cores and six efficiency cores. The next-generation cores boast improved branch prediction, with wider decode and execution engines for the performance cores, and a deeper execution engine for the efficiency cores. On top of that, both types of cores feature enhanced ML accelerators. These advancements allow the chip to perform up to 1.5x faster CPU than the M2 in the previous iPad Pro.
The M4 also has a GPU that builds upon the next-generation graphics architecture of the M3. Some of the key features include Dynamic Caching, a local memory allocation technique that increases performance, as well as support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading.
Last but certainly not the least is the new Neural Engine, a block in the chip dedicated to the acceleration of AI tasks. Apple says that the M4's Neural Engine is its most powerful yet, capable of 38 trillion operations per second, which is 60x faster than the first Neural Engine in the A11 Bionic.
These AI capabilities power nifty features in iPadOS like Live Captions, which bring real-time audio captions to content, and Visual Look Up, which identifies objects in videos and photos. What's more, the M4 iPad Pro can 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 listening to someone play the piano. The M4 does all these tasks are on-device, and it does so efficiently and privately while minimising the impact on memory and battery life.
"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," said Johny Srouji, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies. "Altogether, this new chip makes iPad Pro the most powerful device of its kind."
Apple at its Let Loose event unveiled the M4, the latest iteration of its M-series of chips that power its MacBook laptops and iPad tablets.
The new chip is debuting on the new iPad Pro, which is the thinnest Apple product yet.
The M4 features a 10-core CPU, a new display engine and a more powerful Neural Engine.