Apple revealed, on the sidelines of the presentation of new iPad Pro, a new M4 processor. This chip, more powerful and more energy efficient, is also designed for artificial intelligence.
For several months, and the first rumors surrounding the release of a next iPad Pro, the usual rumors in the corridors seemed to agree on the presence of an M3 processor in Apple’s future premium tablet. However, Tim Cook and his teams had kept a nice surprise for the presentation of the device, which was held this Tuesday, May 7, 2024. The new iPad Pro indeed skips a generation, and moves to the brand new M4 processor. During the keynote, the brand took a few minutes to detail the new features and improvements made to this new SoC.
A more powerful, more energy-saving chip
The M4 processor closely follows the Apple M3 chip, introduced by the brand less than a year ago and which equips the iMac or the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.
The chip is thus still engraved at 3 nm and integrates ten CPU cores with four high-performance cores, as well as six high-energy efficiency cores, used for the least demanding tasks in order to preserve the autonomy of the tablet and the next portable Macs. who will be equipped with it in the future.
Apple compares the performance of the M4 processor to that of the M2 chip, present on the iPad Pro 2022. The brand thus indicates that CPU performance is 1.5x faster in resource-intensive applications such as Logic Pro or Final Cut Pro.
The GPU also inherits ten cores and offers support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading, a first for an iPad, according to Apple’s press release. GPU performance is four times higher than that of the M2 chip.
The M4 chip finally integrates a media engine which can, for the first time on an iPad, use hardware acceleration for AV1, a codec allowing greater compression and used by platforms like YouTube or Netflix.
Despite this power boost, Apple indicates that the M4 chip consumes half as much energy for equivalent tasks.
The M4 chip prepares Apple’s future in artificial intelligence
Apple has not yet mentioned these plans in terms of artificial intelligence. The Californian manufacturer is lagging behind on the subject compared to its competitors like Microsoft or Google, and should logically take advantage of WWDC, the developers conference scheduled for the beginning of next June, to detail in more detail the new functionalities planned through the different operating systems.
However, this does not prevent it from paving the way from a hardware point of view, and this M4 chip is proof of that. During the presentation, an Apple manager also declared with a hint of mischief that the company had been designing chips dedicated to machine learning since the A11 Bionic in 2017, and which equipped the iPhone .
The M4 processor integrates a Neural Engine capable of processing 38 trillion operations per second. Apple revealed on this occasion some rare uses of this computing capacity, such as the possibility of removing shadows when scanning a document or live subtitles on a video.
Apple’s software will also use the Neural Engine, notably Final Cut Pro, with a functionality allowing you to isolate a subject to modify the background, all done locally without calling a server.
Although we will have to wait a little longer to see Apple’s plans in terms of artificial intelligence, third-party developers will already be able to take advantage of this performance for their own software.
Source: Apple press release
Grand master of robot vacuum cleaners and home automation who lives in a “house of the future”. I also like talking about films and series on the internet. Eternal padawan, curious about everything related to new technologies.
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