Apple M4

Design

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

It is Apple's first SoC to reportedly use the ARMv9 CPU architecture. The M4 is based on ARMv9.2a. It supports the Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) but not the Scalable Vector Extension (SVE). Because of the lack of SVE support, the LLVM compiler officially flags the M4 as supporting ARMv8.7a.

CPU

The base M4 features an 8, 9 or 10-core design made up of three or four performance cores and four or six efficiency cores (with one performance core disabled on binned models)

The M4 Pro features a 12 or 14-core CPU, with eight or ten performance cores and four efficiency cores. Meanwhile, the M4 Max features a 14 or 16-core CPU, with an optional two more performance cores than the M4 Pro.

GPU

The base M4 includes an 8, 9 (on iPad Air), or 10-core GPU, with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, dynamic caching, and mesh shading introduced with the M3. The M4 Pro has a 16 or 20-core GPU, while the M4 Max contains a 32 or 40-core GPU.

Apple claims that the ray tracing engine of the M4 family of GPUs is twice as fast as the M3.

NPU

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.

Memory

The M4 is packaged with LPDDR5X unified memory, supporting 120GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The SoC is offered in 8GB, 12GB, 16GB, 24GB, and 32GB configurations, with the 8GB and 12GB configuration only being available on the iPad.

The M4 Pro is available with up to 64GB unified memory (Mac Mini) with a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 273GB/sec. The M4 Max is capable of addressing up to 128GB unified memory, with over half a terabyte per second (546GB/sec) of memory bandwidth, with a slightly reduced bandwidth (410GB/sec) for the binned 32-core M4 Max.