Apple launches M4 chipset with immense AI power

During the “Let Loose” Event, Apple introduced its new M4 chipset built with second-generation 3nm processing technology to provide new performance and a powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) unit.

It has a new 10-core CPU that is up to 50 percent faster than M2. The core distribution includes 4 performance cores for:

• Improved branch prediction
• Wider decode and execution engines
• Next-generation ML accelerators

The other 6 efficiency cores help to:

• Improve branch prediction
• Deeper execution engine
• Next-generation ML accelerators

It supports new 120GB/S unified memory bandwidth and supports a new Tandem OLED display engine for a bright and colorful image processing capability.

This new chipset improves Dynamic caching, mesh shading, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing introduced with M3 last year. The company has fed the second generation of these technologies to improve the performance of graphical tasks for a fast experience using the 10-core GPU architecture.

NPU

The Apple M4 chipset comes with a dedicated 16-core Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which is 60 times faster than the first generation of NPU introduced with the A11 Bionic. The chip has over 28 billion transistors in that new NPU, capable of performing 38 trillion operations per second (ops/sec).

Apple also showcased some of the new capabilities of this AI engine, which could remove background from a 4K clip in real-time.

Other AI capabilities include persist in new iPadOS features such as Live Captions for real-time audio captions. Visual Look Up now helps to identify objects in video and photos with on-device AI.

Power Efficiency:

Apple says its new M4 chip can deliver the performance level of M2 using just half of the power. This efficiency goes beyond when it compares to a light notebook with a much lower power intake.

The new M4 chip is shipping exclusively with new iPad Pro tablets.

(source)