Experience Elite Luxury: Unveil the Exquisite New iPad Pro with M4 Chip – A Masterpiece at $2,399!

The much-anticipated Apple M4 chip has just made its debut on the new generation of iPad Pro.

At 10 a.m. on May 7, Pacific Time, Apple held a spring new product launch special event. This event launched new models of iPad (Air and Pro), as well as new generation of Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard accessories etc.

Of course, the new generation iPad Pro is the focus of everyone’s attention at this press conference, especially the chip it carries.

Apple did not let everyone down，equipping the iPad Pro with its new generation M4 chip, which is also the debut of this chip.

“You might think we would use the extremely powerful M3 chip, but we have jumped to the next generation – the M4 chip.”

That is to say, the chip equipped with the all-new iPad Pro jumped directly from M2 to M4.

This image below can be said to sum up the powerful performance of the M4 chip in one picture.

To elaborate,the all-new M4 chip is composed of 28 billion transistors, built on the second-generation 3nm technology, and has made a series of improvements in terms of CPU, GPU, and NPU.

All-new 10-core CPU

In terms of the CPU, the M4 has a 10-core CPU, including 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. The next-generation core has improved branch prediction functionality, providing a broader decode and execution engine for the performance cores, and a deeper execution engine for the efficiency cores.

In addition, the performance and efficiency cores also have enhanced next-generation Machine Learning (ML) accelerators.

Compared to the M2 used in the previous generation iPad Pro, the M4’s CPU performance has improved by 50%.

Therefore, whether processing complicated orchestral files in Logic Pro, or adding high-demand effects to 4K video in LumaFusion, the M4 can enhance the performance of the entire professional work process.

10 核心 GPU

Next, the GPU part. The M4’s brand new 10-core GPU is built on the new generation graphics architecture of the M3 series chip. It has a dynamic caching feature, an innovation by Apple, which can dynamically allocate local memory in hardware in real time, thereby significantly improving the average utilization of the GPU.

This time, the M4 chip has improved the performance of professional applications as well as games. Apple says, this is the first time hardware-accelerated ray tracing has landed on the iPad, achieving more realistic shadows and reflections in gaming and other experiences.

Diablo: Immortal game.

Hardware-accelerated mesh shading is also built into the GPU, providing more powerful geometric processing capabilities and efficiency. In comparison, the M4 chip’s professional rendering performance has greatly improved, being four times the speed of the M2 chip.

Professional rendering software Octane.

In terms of power consumption, the M4 requires only half the power to provide the same performance as the M2. Even compared to the latest PC chips in thin and light laptops, the M4 only requires one-quarter of the power to provide the same performance.

Brand new display engine.

The M4 uses a groundbreaking new display engine, achieving the precision, color accuracy, and brightness uniformity of Ultra Retina XDR.This is the most advanced display created by combining two OLED panels.

The most powerful neural engine.

The neural engine of the M4 uses a 16-core design, making the chip faster and more powerful.

Apple claims that the M4 has the most powerful neural engine in its history, which can perform an astonishing 38 trillion operations per second, 60 times the speed of the first-generation neural engine in the A11 Bionic.

The neural engine, together with the next-generation machine learning accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and the higher bandwidth unified memory, make the M4 an extremely powerful AI chip.

With the AI capabilities in iPadOS (such as Live Captions for real-time audio subtitling and Visual Look Up for identifying targets in videos and photos), the new iPad Pro allows users to quickly complete astonishing AI tasks on the device.

In Apple’s demonstration, the M4-equipped iPad Pro can easily separate the subject from the background in a 4K video in Final Cut Pro with just a light touch.

Apple states that the neural engine in the M4 is more powerful than any neural processing unit in today’s AI PCs.

Since 2017, all of Apple’s chips have included some version of the neural engine, although so far, these chips have been mainly used for enhancing and classifying photos, optical character recognition, offline dictation, and other things. But Apple may need something faster to support edge-based generative artificial intelligence centered around large language models, an AI that Apple expects to launch on iOS and iPadOS 18 at WWDC next month.

Looking at past years, the waiting period between the M1 and M2 and between the M2 and M3 was about a year and a half each. With little technical details released by Apple, it’s hard to know what caused the faster transition between the M3 and M4. It could be that the M3 was behind schedule and the M4 was on time or ahead. Or it could be that the M4 is just a relatively mild architectural update to the M3. This will need subsequent test results to judge.

The M4 version of the iPad Pro starts at $999.

In addition to the chips they carry, other details of the new iPad were also introduced at the Apple press conference.

The new iPad Air comes in 11-inch and 13-inch versions, equipped with M2 chips, supports Wi-Fi 6E (a model that supports 5G can be chosen), and the maximum storage space is 1TB. It’s 50% faster than the iPad Air equipped with an M1 chip, but the display is still an LED screen.

The new iPad Pro also comes in 11-inch and 13-inch versions, using a double-layer serial OLED screen that is brighter and displays colors more accurately. Its full-screen brightness can reach 1000 nits, and peak brightness can reach 1600 nits. Apple refers to it as an “Ultra-Precision Retina XDR display”.

In terms of pricing, the 11-inch model starts at $999, and the 13-inch model starts at $1,299. However, if you want higher specifications, the budget will skyrocket. The top-spec 13-inch 2TB model reaches $2,299. If you opt for nano-textured glass, the price will rise to $2,399. This may be the most expensive iPad model in history.

The new product will be available for order at 9.pm on May 8th and will be released on May 15th. Are you planning on getting one?