Apple M4 Unveiled with the fastest Neural Engine

Apple held its iPad-focused event today, which surprisingly served as launch stage for the brand new Apple M4 chip. The new chipset is powering the iPad Pro and comes with Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever. According to the company, it is capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second. Apple states that it is faster than neural processing unit of any AI PC today.

Apple M4 Unveiled as the world’s fastest silicon for AI

With this claim, the iPad Pro now stands as one of the most powerful mobile devices for artificial intelligence. The launch of the Apple M4 with focus in AI, also confirms the rumors of 2024 as Apple’s determinant entrance in the AI trend.

The Apple M4 CPU is a 10-Core CPU with 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. The CPU is touted as 1.5x faster than the Apple M2 in the previous iPad Pro from 2022. The odd fact here is that Apple has chosen the M2 to compare instead of the Apple M3. The chip is built on a second-generation 3nm process. It comes with a brand new display engine which has tandem OLED support and 10Hz-120Hz ProMotion (Apple’s fancy term for variable refresh rate).

The GPU also is a 10-core unit with hardware-accelerated ray tracing. It also has hardware-accelerated mesh shading. The Apple M4 is said to deliver the same performance as the Apple M2, but uses just half the power. It has the same performance as the “latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop” using just a fourth of the power. Apple has chosen the ASUS ZenBook 14 OLED with Intel Core Ultra 8 155H and 32 GB of RAM to compare.

The M4 also has support for hardware acceleration of the AV1 codec, in addition to H.264, HEBC, and ProRes. As per the most recent rumors, Apple will soon unveil M4-powered Macs. They’re set to come later this year.