The Apple M4 SoC has been the big novelty in hardware at the event Let Loose where Apple has presented its new generation of electronic tablets, the iPad Air and especially the new iPad Pro, which is where the new chipset shines.
We cannot say that we were surprised by the announcement of Apple’s new hardware engine because we had anticipated it last week. What the leakers could not assure is that its premiere took place so soon. The Cupertino firm must have thought that it was a good time considering that we are facing the largest renewal of the tablet line since 2018.
The Apple M4 SoC, in detail
There are few manufacturers that work on the ARM architecture like Apple. It has been demonstrating this with its own line of chipsets for mobile devices that have stood out among the best on the market and also with an exemplary transition to replace x86 on your Mac computers.
The Apple M4 SoC is manufactured in 3 nanometer technological processes and has 28 billion transistors. According to Apple, it represents a big leap compared to the M2 used in previous iPads in all sections, performance, efficiency, in the screen engine designed specifically to move the OLED panel and of course in its capabilities to accelerate AI processes.
CPU
The M4 chip includes a 10 core CPU Made up of four high-performance cores and six efficiency cores for less demanding tasks. Next-generation cores feature greater branch prediction capabilities, with expanded decoding and execution engines on performance cores and an optimized engine on efficiency cores. Note that both types of cores incorporate state-of-the-art machine learning accelerators.
With all this, the M4’s CPU is up to 1.5 times faster than the M2 chip of the previous generation iPad Pro. Apple points to examples of professional computing tasks where the M4 boosts performance in workflows, from working on processing complex orchestral music files in Logic Pro to creating advanced 4K video effects with LumaFusion.
GPU
The integrated graphics builds on the technical foundations we know from the M3 family of chips, using dynamic caching to optimize performance, but adding important features we see in dedicated graphics, such as ray tracing by hardware acceleration that comes to the iPad for the first time,
The GPU also integrates hardware-accelerated mesh shading, which increases the possibilities and efficiency of geometry processing and opens the door to more visually complex scenes in graphically intensive games and apps. Apple says professional rendering apps like Octane run up to four times faster than with the M2.
Neural Engine
Hardware to accelerate artificial intelligence processes is key today in any type of chip and it was expected that Apple, lagging until now in this type of features, would mount a really powerful neural processing engine. And he has complied.
The Apple M4 SoC includes an on-chip PI core dedicated to accelerating AI processes, which is the most powerful ever designed by Applecapable of managing 38 billion operations per second and supported by the AI ​​functions of the iPadOS operating system.
Media Engine
Finally, Apple has highlighted the M4 chip’s multimedia engine as the most advanced ever produced for an iPad. It supports standard video codecs, H.264, HEVC and ProRes, and for the first time on Apple tablets with hardware acceleration for AV1.
We will have time to analyze (in the real world) the performance and efficiency of this M4 chip that Apple has released in the new iPad Pro. On paper, it looks really good and will be the basis on which the new Max and Ultra for Mac computers.
