Apple announces new M4 chip built with 3-nanometer technology powering new iPad Pro

Apple has announced the latest iteration of its custom processor, the new M4 chip, which will power the new iPad Pro line-up. The M4 chip is the second generation of Apple's 3-nanometer technology (28 billion transistors), and the company is touting a brand-new display engine that will utilize the Ultra Retina XDR OLED display on iPad Pro.

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The new M4 CPU features up to 10 cores (4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores), with a next-gen 10-core GPU that "builds on the next-generation GPU architecture introduced in M3" with new caching tech called Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading. It's the most powerful GPU ever to hit the iPad, so it will be interesting to see how it fares with modern games.

Of course, AI is a vital component of the new M4 chip - it's "Apple's fastest Neural Engine ever," sporting an AI performance of 38 TOPS, higher than Intel's current Core Ultra and AMD's current Ryzen offerings. The M4 also features faster memory bandwidth to help push AI performance even further.

With the M4 debuting in the iPad Pro, it's safe to assume that the new flagship tablet is also an AI PC. "The Neural Engine in M4 is Apple's most capable yet and is more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC today," Apple writes. In typical Apple fashion, the press release compares performance to M2, with Apple citing a 1.5X increase in performance.

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The comparison here is apt because the previous iPad Pro featured the M2 chip. In terms of efficiency, Apple states that the new M4 can deliver the same performance as the M2 using just half the power. Although it doesn't call out Intel or AMD, the M4 can deliver the same performance as the "latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop" using just a quarter of the power.

"The new iPad Pro with M4 is a great example of how building best-in-class custom silicon enables breakthrough products," said Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Technologies.

"The power-efficient performance of M4, along with its new display engine, makes the thin design and game-changing display of iPad Pro possible, while fundamental improvements to the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and memory system make M4 extremely well suited for the latest applications leveraging AI. Altogether, this new chip makes iPad Po the most powerful device of its kind."