Apple M4 (10 cores)

The 10-core Apple M4 is an impressively fast ARM architecture processor (SoC) featuring 4 performance and 6 efficiency CPU cores along with a 16-core neural engine and a 10-core GPU that sports hardware RT support. Other noteworthy features include 7500 MT/s RAM support, USB 4 support and Thunderbolt 3 support. The M4 debuted in May 2024 as part of an iPad launch event; it has 4 performance cores running at up to 4.4 GHz, representing a healthy improvement over the base M3 and its 4.06 GHz top clock speed. Besides, this new chip also has 6 efficiency cores at its disposal. The base M3 had to make do with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, for reference.

The 10-core M4 has a brother that delivers 10% lower multi-thread performance and 15% lower graphics performance, the 9-core M4 chip.

Architecture and Features

It appears the new CPU cores run at faster clock speeds than what the base M3 was capable of while also featuring some minor architectural improvements. SME2 support seems to indicate that a heavily customized version of ARM v9.4-A microarchitecture is employed for both the performance cores and the efficiency cores. The M4 comes with with on-chip LPDDR5X-7500 RAM whereas the M3 was limited to 6400 MT/s; on the other hand, those holding their breath for Wi-Fi 7 and BT 5.4 are about to be disappointed as the new chip is limited to Wi‑Fi 6E and BT 5.3 just like the M3 was. Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 support is onboard, just like DisplayPort support is. The updated NPU delivers up to 38 TOPS of performance for AI workloads.

Performance

The 3 nm chip is 10% to 20% faster than the base M3 in terms of multi-thread and single-thread performance. It also delivers about 10% higher multi-thread performance than the 9-core M4. This puts the 10-core part on equal footing with the Ryzen 7 7745HX, Core i7-13705H and other high-end x86 processors released in 2023 and 2024 - and it is worth highlighting that the Apple chip delivers this kind of performance at a much lower power consumption than AMD and Intel chips do.

It is also important to note that all of the tests we did involve short-term loads. The M4 is very likely to suffer from heavy throttling when subjected to long-term workloads such as gaming as there is no active cooling of any kind inside that super-thin iPad Pro case.

Graphics

Just like the 10-core GPU built into the M3, the M4 GPU (10 cores) has hardware support for ray tracing as well as mesh shading and other modern technologies. It supports external displays with resolutions as high as 6K and it can hardware-decode the popular AV1, HEVC and AVC video codecs (encoding is not yet supported for AV1).

The graphics adapter runs at faster clock speeds than what the (otherwise identical) 10-core GPU built into the 9-core M4 can muster, delivering performance figures a few percentage points higher than those of the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop graphics card. It is once again important to note that the tests we did involve short-term loads only; the iGPU will probably suffer from significant throttling when performing long real-life tasks such as gaming.

Power consumption

The M4 will be confined to a very thin metal chassis with no active cooling of any kind. It makes sense to assume the chip's sustained power consumption won't go over 10 Watts, with short-term peaks of up to 20 Watts theoretically possible. We'll make sure to update this section once we do more tests on the new iPads.

Apple's official media release states that the chip is built with a "second generation 3 nm" process (most likely a TSMC process) making for very good, as of H1 2024, power efficiency.

Series

Apple Apple M4