Apple M4

Last updated
Apple M4 Series
General information
Launched
  • M4: May 15, 2024;6 months ago (2024-05-15)
  • M4 Pro and Max: November 8, 2024;12 days ago (2024-11-08)
Designed by Apple
Common manufacturer
Architecture and classification
Application
Technology node 3 nm (N3E)
Instruction set ARMv9.2-A [1]
Physical specifications
Transistors
    • M4
    • 28 billion
Cores
    • M4
    • 8–10 (3–4 P-Core + 4–6 E-Core)
    • M4 Pro
    • 12–14 (8–10 P-Core + 4 E-Core)
    • M4 Max
    • 14–16 (10–12 P-Core + 4 E-Core)
Memory (RAM)
    • M4
    • LPDDR5X 7500 MT/s
    • (8 or 16 or 24 or 32 GB) [2]
    • M4 Pro
    • LPDDR5X 8533 MT/s
    • (24 or 48 or 64 GB)
    • M4 Max
    • LPDDR5X 8533 MT/s
    • (36 or 48 or 64 or 128 GB)
GPUs
  • Apple-designed integrated graphics
  • M4
  • 8–10 core
  • M4 Pro
  • 16–20 core
  • M4 Max
  • 32–40 core
Co-processor NPU: 38 TOPS
Products, models, variants
Variant
History
Predecessor Apple M3

Apple M4 is a series of 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). The M4 chip was introduced in May 2024 for the iPad Pro (7th generation), and is the fourth generation of the M series Apple silicon architecture, succeeding the Apple M3. [3] [4] [5] It was followed by the professional-focused M4 Pro and M4 Max in October 2024. [6]

Contents

The M4 series is built upon TSMC's second-generation 3-nanometer process and contains 28 billion transistors. [7]

Design

The base 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. [8]

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, claimed to be more than double the advertised performance of the M3. The M4 NPU performs over 60× faster than the A11 Bionic, and is approximately 3× faster than the original M1. [9]

The M4 is packaged with LPDDR5X unified memory, supporting 120GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The SoC is currently offered in 8GB, 16GB, 24GB, and 32GB configurations. It is also Apple's first SoC to use the ARMv9 CPU architecture (specifically ARMv9.2-A). [10] [3]

M4 Pro

The M4 Pro features an up to 14-core CPU, with 10 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, along with up to a 20-core GPU that Apple claims is twice as powerful as that in the M4 when used in the corresponding MacBook Pro. The M4 Pro is available with up to 64GB unified memory (Mac Mini) with a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 273GB/sec. [11]

M4 Max

The M4 Max chip comes with up to 16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, and 16 Neural Engine cores, addressing up to 128GB unified memory with over half a terabyte per second (546GB/sec) of memory bandwidth. [12]

Performance

Apple claims up to 50% more CPU performance and 4× more GPU performance on the M4 compared to the M2. The M4 competes for the highest-scoring consumer SoC for single-core benchmarks according to various sources such as the Geekbench benchmarking suite [13] and Passmark Software's CPU benchmarks. [14] Compared to other modern CPUs, the M4 does not outperform the M3 Pro in multi-core performance [15] but it does in single-core performance [16] [17] and competes with AMD's Ryzen 7 9700X [18] [19] and Intel's Core i9-14900K. [20] [21] [22] [23] In multithreaded performance, the M4 performs similarly to the 12-core M3 Pro. [24]

Additional features

The M4 is the first iPad SoC to support hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding, as well as hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing introduced to MacBooks in the M3. A new display controller has also been implemented to support the iPad Pro (7th generation)'s Tandem OLED display. [8] [25]

Products that use the Apple M4 series

M4

M4 Pro

M4 Max

Comparison with other SoCs

VariantCPUGPUNPUMemoryTransistor
count		TDP
(W)		Used in
P- [a]
cores		E- [b]
cores		Cores [c] EU ALU CoresPerformanceRAM (MT/s)Control-
lers [d] 		Bandwidth
GB/s
A18 Pro 246967681635 TOPSLPDDR5X 75004608iPhone 16 Pro
M3 48128102418 TOPSLPDDR5 64008102.425 billion20
M43610160128038 TOPSLPDDR5X 750012028 billion22iPad Pro (256–512GB) [27]
4iPad Pro (1–2TB) [27] , iMac (4-port), Mac Mini, MacBook Pro 14"
481281024iMac (2-port)
M4 Pro8162562048LPDDR5X 853316273Mac Mini, MacBook Pro
10203202560
M4 Max32512409624410MacBook Pro
1240640512032546

Notes

  1. ↑ Performance Cores
  2. ↑ Efficiency cores
  3. ↑ Each GPU core has 16 execution units (EUs) and 128 arithmetic logic units (ALUs)
  4. ↑ Each LPDDR5 memory controller contains a 16-bit memory channel and can access up to 4GiB of memory. [2]

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References

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