Apple M4 chip: specs, performance, and when we expect to see them in Macs
Apple officially announced its latest silicon, the Apple M4, at its May ‘Let Loose’ event, the first time the company has announced a new chip in a tablet without first bringing it to its Mac desktops and laptops.
We’ve got a good bit of detail on the Apple M4 thanks to the announcement and what to expect from the new chip and when we can expect it to make its way to the rest of the Apple ecosystem.
So, lets dig into this exciting piece of hardware and talk about this powerful new SoC.
Apple M4 chip: Cut to the chase
- What is it? Apple’s next generation of in-house silicon
- How much does it cost? It doesn’t sell on its own, but instead powers various Apple devices
- When can I get it? It is available now in iPad Pro devices, and may come in Mac devices as soon as late October 2024
Apple M4 chip: Latest news
- M4 MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac are reportedly on track for 2024 launch
- Keen for the MacBook Air M4? Good news – it might turn up earlier than we thought in 2025
- Some of Apple’s M4 Macs are already shipping ahead of rumored October launch
Apple M4 chip: Release date
The Apple M4 chip was announced at the May 7, 2024, ‘Let Loose’ iPad event and shipped with iPad Pro devices on May 13, 2024.
It is expected to be introduced into the Mac lineup, starting with the MacBook Pro 14-inch (2024), Apple Mac mini (2024), and iMac (2024), as early as October 2024, with Apple MacBook Air devices getting the chips in 2025.
However, the order of which devices get the new M4 chip could be shuffled around a bit, and we simply won’t know until new products with the chip are announced.
Apple M4 chip: Specs
The Apple M4 is built on TSMC’s 3nm process node, the same as the Apple M3 chip, though Apple does refer to it as a ‘second-generation’ chip, so it’s more advanced than the Apple M3.
It features up to a 10-core CPU (4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores) and a 10-core GPU, up from the 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU of the base M3 chip, and supports up to 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS) in its 16-core neural engine (Apple’s version of an NPU).
It contains 28 billion transistors, up from 25 billion in the M3, and can support up to 128GB of unified memory.
Like the M3, the Apple M4 also has support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, dynamic caching, and mesh shading. It also features dynamic caching, which improves the memory efficiency of GPU-intensive tasks.
The new M4 chip also introduces support for Tandem OLED displays, which use two OLED pixel layers together to create a single display that offers better efficiency and longevity than traditional OLED panels, as well as hardware-accelerated AV1 media support for the first time.
Apple M4: Performance
It’s hard to compare the performance of the Apple M4 chip to the Apple M3 chip, since the only device that currently has an M4 is the iPad Pro, and comparing a laptop or desktop M3 to a M4 tablet isn’t great. The benchmarks aren’t very consistent, they will have different power profiles, as well as different underlying specs that can throw scores off one way or the other.
But we’re going to do it anyway, at least until we get new Macs that will let us more directly compare specs across similar devices to isolate the M4’s true performance.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
| Header Cell – Column 0 | M4 | M3 | Performance increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geekbench 6 Single-Core | 3,700 | 3,082 | 20.1% |
| Geekbench 6 Multi-Core | 14,523 | 12,087 | 20.2% |
| CrossMark Overall | 1,915 | 1,888 | 1.4% |
| CrossMark Productivity | 1,771 | 1,747 | 1.4% |
| CrossMark Creative | 2,312 | 2,255 | 2.5% |
When it comes to raw synthetic performance, the Apple M4 in the iPad Pro 13-inch is substantially faster than the Apple M3 found in both MacBook Air models, Apple iMac, and MacBook Pro 14-inch.
Both single-core and multi-core performance clocks in about 20% faster on the M4 chip than on the M3, but when you drill down to actual day-to-day performance, the difference between the two is barely noticeable (at least according to CrossMark).
Swipe to scroll horizontally
| Header Cell – Column 0 | M4 | M3 | Performance increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3DMark Wild Life Extreme | 8,289 | 7,866 | 5.4% |
| 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited | 8,529 | 8,306 | 2.7% |
| 3DMark Solar Bay | 14,333 | 12,554 | 14.2% |
| 3DMark Solar Bay Unlimited | 15,266 | 13,569 | 12.5% |
Basic GPU performance on the M4 chip is slightly improved over the M3, though not really enough that you’d notice. When you use ray-tracing, however, the difference becomes much more apparent, with the M4 getting around 13-14% faster performance over its predecessor.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
| Header Cell – Column 0 | M4 | M3 | Performance increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geekbench AI Core ML: Full Precision | 3,280 | 2,474 | 32.6% |
| Geekbench AI Core ML: Half Precision | 18,817 | 13,994 | 34.5% |
| Geekbench AI Core ML: Quantized | 21,724 | 14,861 | 46.2% |
In terms of neural engine performance, the Apple M4 really pulls away, performing AI workloads up to 46% faster than the Apple M3.
This is going to be especially important in the months and years ahead as Apple invests more resources into Apple Intelligence, which is going to require a much better NPU than earlier M-series chips.
Apple M4 chip: The future of the M4
The Apple M4 chip is only in the Apple iPad Pro currently, but with Apple’s expected October 2024 event, we could see the chip roll out to Apple’s Mac lineup, including the Apple iMac M4, Apple MacBook Pro 2024, Apple Mac mini M4, and Apple MacBook Air M4.
While we probably won’t see all of these devices this month, we will almost certainly see some of them, and the rest will likely be announced sometime in early 2025.
We also expect that we’ll see the Apple M4 Pro and Apple M4 Max sometime soon, possibly as early as this month. Either way, this will be an exciting time for the Apple M4 as this powerful chip will start powering some of the world’s best laptop and desktop computers just in time for the Black Friday holiday shopping season.
