Apple's flagship M4 Max processor teased, will power next-gen MacBook Pro laptops

Apple's flagship M4 Max processor has been teased ahead of the new MacBook Pro announcement, with the new high-end 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros to be powered by the M4 Max chip.

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The new details of the M4 Max processor were spotted by developer Charlie Joseph, with the M4 Max image shown on Apple's website (but it's gone now, obviously). The details were shared with Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who shared it far and wide on social media.

Apple's new M4 and M4 Pro chips were just announced, powering the new Mac mini systems, but the new M4 Max chip will find itself into the higher-end configurations of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops. The new M4 Max chip will feature even more CPU and GPU cores, and more unified RAM support (up to 128GB).

The new Apple M4 Pro chip features a 14-core CPU and 20-core GPU with a 16-core Neural Engine, with the company claiming on its website that the new Mac mini with the M4 Pro features the "world's fastest CPU core with lightning-fast single-threaded performance".

Apple's new Mac mini can be configured with the M4 Pro processor and up to 64GB of unified memory, with the 16 cores of CPU split between 10 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. The new Mac mini also supports Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, offering a huge 120Gbps of bandwidth. Apple has also bumped up the memory bandwidth inside of the new M4 Pro Mac mini to 273GB/sec, which is a 75% increase over the M3 Pro.

The previous-gen Apple M3 Pro chip only had 150GB/sec of memory bandwidth, so the bump up to 273GB/sec of memory bandwidth on the new M4 Pro is impressive to see. The Apple M3 Pro had an 11-core CPU (5 performance, 6 efficiency cores) with a 14-core GPU, so there's big upgrades across the board for the new M4 Pro.

Apple explains its new M4 Pro inside of the Mac mini: "For users who want pro-level performance, Mac mini with M4 Pro features the world's fastest CPU core with lightning-fast single-threaded performance. With up to 14 cores, including 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores, M4 Pro also provides phenomenal multithreaded performance. With up to 20 cores, the M4 Pro GPU is up to twice as powerful as the GPU in M4, and both chips bring hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the Mac mini for the first time".

The company continues: "The Neural Engine in M4 Pro is also over 3x faster than in Mac mini with M1, so on-device Apple Intelligence models run at blazing speed. M4 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory and 273GB/s of memory bandwidth - twice as much bandwidth as any AI PC chip - for accelerating AI workloads. And M4 Pro supports Thunderbolt 5, which delivers up to 120 Gb/s data transfer speeds on Mac mini, and more than doubles the throughput of Thunderbolt 4".