Apple M4

Apple M4 is an ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc., part of the Apple silicon series, including a central processing unit (CPU), a graphics processing unit (GPU), a neural processing unit (NPU), and a digital signal processor (DSP). It was introduced in May 2024 for the iPad Pro (M4), and is the fourth generation of the M series Apple Silicon architecture, succeeding the Apple M3.

The M4 SoC is built upon TSMC's second-generation 3-nanometer process, and contains 28 billion transistors.

Design
The M4 features a 10-core design made up of four performance cores and six efficiency cores (with one performance core disabled on binned models). The SOC also includes a 10-core GPU (with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, dynamic caching, and mesh shading introduced with the M3), as well as a 16-core NPU.

The M4 Neural Engine has been significantly improved compared to its predecessor, with the advertised capability to perform up to 38 trillion operations per second (more than double the advertised performance of the M3). The M4 NPU performs over 60x faster than the A11 Bionic, and is approximately 3x faster than the original M1.

The M4 is packaged with LPDDR5X unified memory, supporting 120GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The SOC is currently offered in 8GB and 16GB configurations. It is also Apple's first SoC to use the ARMv9 CPU architecture (specifically ARMv9.2-A).

Performance
Apple claims up to 50% more CPU performance and 4x more GPU performance on the M4 compared to the M2. The M4 currently is the highest-scoring consumer SOC for single-core benchmarks on the Geekbench benchmarking suite, and outperforms both the M3 Max and Intel's Core i9 desktop CPUs. In multithreaded performance, the M4 performs similarly to the 12-core M3 Pro.

Additional features
The M4 is the first iPad SOC to support hardware accelerated AV1 decode, as well as hardware accelerated mesh-shading and raytracing introduced to MacBooks on the M3. A new display controller has also been implemented to support the iPad Pro (7th generation)'s Tandem OLED display.

Apple M4 products

 * iPad Pro (7th generation)