Apple M4 3nm SoC with up to 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU and hardware-accelerated ray tracing

Apple at its 'Let Loose' event announced M4, the company's new ARM-based SoC, as the successor to the M3 series that was introduced in October last year. It uses second-generation 3-nanometer process technology and has more than 28 billion transistors. Provides up to 120GB/s of unified memory bandwidth.

The M4 has up to 10 CPU cores, with up to 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. It offers up to 50% faster CPU performance than the M2. It has a 10-core GPU up to 4x faster than the M2 and features features like Dynamic Caching and hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, which are coming to the iPad for the first time.

The chip features an all-new display engine that promises stunning accuracy, color accuracy and brightness uniformity of the Ultra Retina XDR display, a state-of-the-art display created by combining the light of two OLED panels.

Along with higher unified memory bandwidth, professional rendering applications like Octane will perform up to 4x faster than M2, the company said.

Compared to the M2, the M4 can deliver the same performance using only half the power, and compared to the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, the M4 can deliver the same performance using only a quarter of the power, Apple said .

The M4 neural engine is capable of 38 trillion operations per second, 60 times faster than the first neural engine in the A11 Bionic.

availability

The Apple M4 will power the new iPad Pro that was unveiled today. We can expect more M4 chips to be added later this year, to power the MacBooks.