Apple held its much-anticipated iPad event today, and the most eye-catching news wasn't the new device models or the refreshed iPad Air lineup — it was the unveiling of Apple's homegrown M4 chip with a surprisingly powerful neural processing unit (NPU).
The new iPad Pro + M4 chip
The Arm-compatible M4 — which arrives just months after Cupertino released the M3 — has some power. The 3nm node processor has four performance and six efficiency processor cores, all of which include ML accelerators, in full-spec units, and nine (three performance, six efficiency) in non-full-spec. For example, the 1TB iPad Pro has the variant with 10 cores and the 256GB iPad Pro has nine.
The M4 also has a 10-core GPU that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the iPad and speeds up rendering times; Apple claimed that the silicon can deliver the same performance as an equivalent GPU in a "thin and light laptop" with a quarter of the power consumption.
The neural engine in the M4 raised some eyebrows: According to Apple, the M4's NPU can handle 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS), presumably with INT8. If that peak figure is correct, it is faster than AMD's Ryzen 8040 series, with its 16 TOPS, or Intel Meteor Lake, which has an NPU that can reach 11 TOPS. Intel Lunar Lake, which will have an NPU capable of reaching 45 TOPS, won't be out until late next year.
