The M4 chip achieves the groundbreaking design and stunning display of the new iPad Pro, while also delivering a significant leap in performance.

Apple today announced the M4 chip, which brings powerful performance to the all-new iPad Pro. Crafted with a second-generation 3-nanometer process, the M4 chip adopts an SoC architecture, further enhancing the exceptional energy efficiency of Apple's chips, enabling the ultra-thin design of the iPad Pro. This chip also integrates a new display engine, which helps the iPad Pro's groundbreaking Liquid Retina XDR display to achieve astonishing precision, color, and brightness. The new central processor with up to 10 cores and the 10-core graphics processor are built upon the next-generation graphics architecture of the M3 series chip. It introduces dynamic cache, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading to the iPad for the first time. The M4 chip also integrates Apple's fastest neural engine to date, with a computation speed of up to 38 trillion operations per second, leading the industry. Coupled with faster memory bandwidth, a new generation of machine learning accelerators built into the central processor, and high-performance graphics processors, the M4 chip endows the new iPad Pro with superior performance, making it an ideal device for handling artificial intelligence tasks.

"Creating industry-leading custom chips enables breakthrough products, and the new iPad Pro with the M4 chip is an excellent proof," said Johny Srouji, Apple's Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies. "The energy efficiency of the M4 chip, combined with the new display engine, achieves the thin design and disruptive display effects of the iPad Pro; the comprehensive upgrade of the central processor, graphics processor, neural engine, and memory system makes the M4 an ideal chip to drive the latest AI applications. With all these features, this new chip makes the iPad Pro an unparalleled device."

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New technology achieves the new iPad Pro

Compared to the M2 chip on the previous generation iPad Pro, the M4 chip has made a significant leap in performance. It is built with a second-generation 3-nanometer process, integrating a total of 28 billion transistors, further enhancing the energy efficiency of Apple's chips. The M4 chip also integrates a new display engine based on cutting-edge technology, bringing astonishing display precision, color accuracy, and brightness consistency to the Liquid Retina XDR display. By superimposing and fusing the light of two OLED panels, this extremely advanced display is created.New 10-core Central Processor

The M4 chip features an all-new 10-core central processor, with up to 4 high-performance cores and 6 high-efficiency cores. The new generation cores incorporate improved branch prediction technology, with the high-performance cores utilizing higher bandwidth decoding and execution engines, and the high-efficiency cores featuring deeper execution engines. Both types of cores also benefit from the next-generation machine learning accelerators that offer enhanced performance.

Compared to the powerful M2 chip in the previous generation iPad Pro, the M4 chip delivers up to 1.5 times the central processing unit (CPU) performance. Whether handling complex symphonic projects in Logic Pro or adding highly demanding effects to 4K videos in LumaFusion, the M4 chip provides robust performance for a variety of professional workflows.

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Graphics Processor Powers New Performance for iPad Pro

The M4 chip's new 10-core graphics processor is built upon the next-generation graphics architecture of the M3 series chips. Its unique dynamic cache technology is a significant innovation by Apple, enabling real-time dynamic allocation of local memory within the hardware, which significantly boosts the average utilization rate of the graphics processor. This results in a substantial performance improvement when running demanding professional apps and games.

Hardware-accelerated ray tracing makes its debut on iPad devices, enhancing the realism of shadows and reflections in games and other image-intensive experiences. The graphics processor also integrates hardware-accelerated mesh shading technology, which achieves better performance and efficiency when processing geometric models, aiding in the realization of more visually complex scenes in games and graphics-intensive apps. The M4 chip also significantly boosts professional rendering performance for apps like Octane, offering up to 4 times the speed compared to the M2 chip. While the CPU and GPU have undergone the aforementioned upgrades, the M4 chip continues Apple's industry-leading performance-to-power ratio. The M4 chip achieves equivalent performance to the M2 chip with only half the power consumption; compared to the latest chips in thin and light PC laptops, the M4 chip achieves equivalent performance with only a quarter of the power consumption.

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The Most Powerful Neural Engine to DateThe M4 chip's ultra-high-speed neural engine is an IP module within the chip, specifically designed to accelerate AI tasks. This is Apple's most powerful neural engine to date, with a computational speed of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is an astonishing 60 times faster than the first-generation neural engine in the A11 Bionic chip. Combined with the new generation of machine learning accelerators in the central processor, high-performance graphics processors, and increased unified memory bandwidth, the neural engine endows the M4 chip with super performance, making it an ideal chip for handling AI tasks. With various AI features of the iPadOS system, such as real-time captioning that generates subtitles based on audio content and visual look-up that recognizes objects in videos and photos, the new iPad Pro can help users quickly complete a variety of amazing AI tasks on the device.

Using the iPad Pro with the M4 chip, it is easy to separate the subject from the background in 4K videos with just a tap in Final Cut Pro, and in StaffPad, sheet music can be automatically generated in real-time during piano performances. The iPad Pro can also efficiently and securely complete various inferential tasks, minimizing the impact of such tasks on app memory usage, response speed, and battery life. The M4 chip integrates Apple's most powerful neural engine to date, leading the industry.

Advanced media processing engine for smooth and energy-efficient streaming experience

The media processing engine within the M4 chip is the most advanced media processing engine that the iPad has ever had. In addition to supporting popular video codecs such as H.264, HEVC, and ProRes, it also brings AV1 hardware acceleration support to the iPad for the first time, enabling more energy-efficient playback of high-definition videos from streaming services.

More environmentally friendly

The energy efficiency of the M4 chip ensures that the new iPad Pro meets Apple's high standards for energy efficiency, achieving battery life that can last from morning to night. This means that the iPad Pro requires less charging time and consumes less energy throughout its product life cycle.

Currently, Apple has achieved carbon neutrality in its global corporate operations and plans to achieve carbon neutrality across its entire manufacturing supply chain and product life cycle by 2030.