Apple M4 chip with more cores and faster GPU unveiled

The Let Loose event is now behind us and has seen, among other things, a new chip in the form of the Apple M4, which boasts numerous improvements. The number of cores has increased, but GPU performance is also significantly higher.

Apple M4 officially unveiled

The new Apple M4 will be used for the first time in the upcoming iPad Pro, but is also likely to power the manufacturer’s upcoming MacBook models. It is manufactured using an improved 3 nm process and is significantly more energy-efficient: Apple promises the maximum performance of the M2 with half the power consumption.

The new CPU comes with up to ten cores and the new 10-core GPU is based on the next-generation GPU architecture introduced with the M3. Dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing and hardware-accelerated mesh shading are among the features of the GPU.

Dynamic caching dynamically adjusts the local memory to the hardware in real time, giving the GPU more headroom and noticeably improving performance in apps and games. “Compared to the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, the M4 can achieve the same performance with just a quarter of the power,” Apple promises, referring to the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED (UX3405MA) with Core Ultra 7 155H and 32 GB RAM.

At the same time, the performance of the Neural Engine, which is used for AI workloads, also increases significantly. Up to 38 trillion computing operations per second are possible, making it 60 times faster than the first Neural Engine, which was used in the A11 Bionic at the time.

This allows the new iPad Pro to perform sophisticated AI calculations directly on the device, including new features such as Live Subtitles for real-time audio subtitles and Visual Lookup, which recognizes objects in videos and photos. With the tap of a finger, the new iPad Pro can crop a subject from the background across an entire 4K video or automatically create a music notation in StaffPad in real time.

Basically, the Apple M4 relies on four performance and six efficiency cores. However, there is also a customized version that only uses three performance cores. It is used in the new standard iPad Pro with up to 512 GB of memory. The faster new M4 with the maximum number of cores is only available from the 1 TB variant upwards.