- Apple has announced the new iPad Pro with the M4 chip, claiming it to be an outrageously powerful chip for AI.
- The M4 chip is based on the 2nd generation 3nm chip fabrication process.
- The latest chip can deliver up to two times faster CPU performance as compared to the M2 chip.
At its Let Loose event, Apple announced the new iPad Air and iPad Pro. As pointed out by Mark Gurman previously, Apple has launched its latest iPad Pro with the M4 chip, touting it to be twice as powerful compared to the M2 chip. Apple says that the new M4 chip is “an outrageously powerful chip for AI.”
The M4 chip is based on the 2nd generation 3nm chip fabrication process and features a new display engine to support the new iPad Pro’s Tandem OLED Display. The new chip has four performance cores and six efficiency cores. All the cores on the chip feature ML accelerators. As for the GPU, the new M4 chip has a 10-core GPU with ray-tracing capabilities. Apple has claimed that the M4 delivers up to 4x faster performance in GPU-intensive tasks in comparison to the predecessor.
Apple’s latest M4 chip is built for AI tasks and it has a 16-core neural engine along with ML accelerators, helping it deliver up to 1.5x faster CPU performance as compared to the M2 chip in the predecessor.
With the M4 chip, Apple is bringing features like Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing to the iPad for the first time ever.
At the stage, Apple said that pro-rendering apps like Octane will leverage M4’s higher unified memory bandwidth. Not only in the CPU and GPU department, but the M4 chip also offers industry-leading performance per watt, translating to faster performance and higher efficiency.
AI Features in M4 Chip
For the first time, Apple dedicated a good amount of time on the stage to elaborate on the AI features delivered by the M4 chip. The company says the new chip has Apple’s most powerful Neural Engine ever. It can compute 38 trillion operations per second, making it 60 times faster than the A11 Bionic chip. Boasting the AI features of the M4 chip, Apple mentioned that the new iPad Pro can perform AI-powered tasks like removing the subject from the background in Final Cut Pro in a jiffy.
The iPadOS will also support the M4 chip by allowing developers to tap into the Core ML and offer AI features. The M4 chip coupled with the iPadOS will be capable of running generative AI models, cloud-based solutions, and powerful AI apps like Microsoft Copilot and Adobe Firefly.
The iPad Pro with the new M4 chip starts at $999 for the 11-inch model and $1299 for the 13-inch model.
