2024-05-12 23:27:26
While not all Macs have switched to the M3 chips that were launched six months ago, Apple has just announced iPad Pros equipped with an M4 chip. And if the company remains, as is often the case, stingy with details, it is still possible to paint an interesting portrait of this new generation.
That changes little
Let’s start with what changes little and what doesn’t. First, the memory reaches a bandwidth of 120 GB/s, which is 20 GB/s more than the M2 and M3 chips. To achieve this value, Apple probably simply changed the frequency of the RAM: we would go from LPDDR5-6400 to LPDDRX5-7600, a modification already made during the jump from M1 to M2. We stay quite far from the bandwidth of the M3 Max chips (400 GB/s), but we come close to the M3 Pro (150 GB/s).
The GPU moves little.
Second is the GPU first the same as the M3 chip, with the new architecture capable of supporting ray tracing. As is often the case, Apple tries to confuse the issue: the gains are advertised relative to the M2 chip, comparing a program that provides ray tracing on a component that doesn’t accelerate it (M2) and a GPU that accelerates it (M4) still gives huge advantages — Apple is talking about a 4x faster GPU in this case.
The fact remains that if Apple does not communicate the power in teraflops, we estimated it between 4 and 4.5 teraflops on the M3, with an increase of around 10 to 20% in practice compared to the M2. We still get the decoding of the AV1 codec, absent from the M2 chips. In absolute terms, the graphics section is always the poor relation in the range, especially compared to the competition.
M4: Will Apple be overtaken by Intel, AMD and Qualcomm?
The display engine doesn’t get any better.
As for the GPU, we can note that it probably won’t support more displays than the M1 to M3 chips. As a reminder, Apple manages two physical displays on this type of chip, with three internal DisplayPort connectors. In a Mac, this is what makes it possible, for example, to connect a 6K display (which requires two links) to a MacBook Air in addition to the internal display. This is probably the technology with which Apple connects the Tandem OLED display to the iPad Pro, by the way. Externally, the tablets only accept one external display, like other models.
An improved multi-core CPU
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