Apple M4 chip powers innovative iPad Pro design

Apple M4 processor

M4, which also provides a significant performance improvement, enables the new iPad Pro's stunning display and inventive design.

Date of release of M4 chips

Apple formally revealed the M4 CPU together with the new iPad Pro on May 7, 2024. Unfortunately, it's only compatible with the iPad Pro right now. It's likely that we won't get Macs and MacBooks until later this year or even early 2025.

The cutting-edge iPad Pro is powered by the latest Apple M4 chip, which delivers amazing performance. Utilising second-generation 3-nanometer technology, the M4 system-on-a-chip (SoC) enhances the industry-leading power efficiency of Apple silicon and enables the incredibly thin design of the iPad Pro. It also features an entirely new display engine to power the revolutionary Ultra Retina XDR display on iPad Pro, which boasts incredible accuracy, colour, and brightness.

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. The M4 boasts Apple's fastest neural engine to date, capable of performing up to 38 trillion operations per second, which outpaces the neural processing unit found in any AI PC available today.


The new iPad Pro is an extremely powerful artificial intelligence tool because of the Apple M4 processor, increased memory bandwidth, a high-performance GPU, and next-generation machine learning (ML) accelerators in the CPU.

Johny Srouji, senior vice president of Hardware Technologies at Apple, said, "Creating best-in-class custom silicon enables breakthrough products," citing the new iPad Pro with M4. 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, memory system, and neural engine make the M4 perfect for the newest AI-enabled apps. With this new CPU, the iPad Pro is the most powerful device of its kind.

New Technologies Enabling the Most Recent iPad Pro

Performance-wise, the M4 iPad Pro is noticeably better than the M2 variant. Apple silicon boasts a higher power efficiency due to its 28 billion transistors, which are built using second-generation 3-nanometer technology. Thanks to a brand-new display engine created with cutting-edge technology incorporated in the M4, the Ultra Retina XDR display a cutting-edge display made possible by combining the light of two OLED panels has exceptional precision, colour accuracy, and brightness uniformity.

A newly designed ten-core CPU

With four speed cores and six efficiency cores, the new Apple M4 chip has up to ten cores. The next-generation cores offer improved branch prediction with wider decoding and execution engines for performance cores and deeper execution engines for efficiency cores. Better, next-generation ML accelerators are another feature shared by both kinds of cores.

Up to 1.5 times quicker CPU performance is provided by the Apple M4 chip in comparison to the powerful M2 in the previous iPad Pro. Whether using LumaFusion to add difficult effects to 4K video or Logic Pro to work with complex orchestral music files, M4 enhances performance across professional workflows.

GPU Adds New Capabilities to the iPad Pro

The new 10-core GPU of the Apple M4 chip extends the next-generation graphics architecture of the M3 family of processors. It features Apple's ground-breaking Dynamic Caching, which dynamically allocates local memory in real time and hardware to greatly increase the average GPU utilisation. This significantly improves performance for even the most demanding pro apps and games.

Games and other visually stimulating content can now include lifelike reflections and shadows for the first time thanks to iPad hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Games and other graphics-intensive apps can support more graphically complex scenarios thanks to the GPU's hardware-accelerated mesh shading. With applications like Octane, the pro rendering speed is now up to four times faster than on the M2 thanks to the huge improvements made by the Apple M4 CPU. The industry-best performance per watt of Apple silicon is maintained by the CPU and GPU improvements in M4. M4 is capable of matching M2's performance with only half the power. Furthermore, in a lightweight and thin laptop, the M4 uses only 25% of the power to accomplish the same performance as the newest PC processor.

The Most Powerful Neural Engine Ever, the M4, contains the fastest neural engine ever discovered in an IP block created especially to speed up AI workloads. This is Apple's most powerful brain engine yet, performing 38 trillion operations per second, or 60 times faster than the original neural engine found in the A11 Bionic. The Apple M4 processor's Neural Engine, when paired with the high-performance GPU, higher-bandwidth unified memory, and next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, makes it an extremely powerful chip for artificial intelligence.

Additionally, with iPadOS AI features like Live Captions which offers real-time audio captions and Visual Look Up which detects objects in images and videos users can accomplish amazing AI tasks quickly and on-device with the new iPad Pro.

The iPad Pro with Apple M4 processor can tap-free separate a subject from the backdrop of a 4K film in Final Cut Pro with just a tap, and it can automatically produce musical notation in real-time by listening to a piano performance in StaffPad. Additionally, with the least amount of detrimental effects on battery life, app memory, and app performance, inference workloads can be executed successfully and covertly. The M4's neural engine is Apple's most powerful to yet, surpassing the capabilities of any neural processing unit found in any AI PC available today.

Innovative Media Engine for Smooth, Efficient Streaming

The M4 has the most advanced Media Engine that is compatible with the iPad. In addition to supporting the most popular video codecs, including HEVC, ProRes, and H.264, it also brings hardware acceleration for AV1 to the iPad for the first time. This improves the power efficiency of high-definition video playback for streaming services.

Greater Advantage to the Environment

Apple has high criteria for energy efficiency, and the new iPad Pro satisfies them while providing a full day's worth of battery life because of the Apple M4 chip's power-efficient capabilities. It consequently requires less time to plug in and consumes less energy over the course of its lifetime.


As of right now, Apple's global corporate operations are carbon neutral, and by 2030, it hopes to achieve carbon neutrality across its manufacturing supply chain and product life cycle.

News Source:  Apple M4 chip


 

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