Apple is introducing its latest CPU called M4, which is manufactured by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) based in Taiwan. TSMC utilizes the cutting-edge 3nm technology in the chip’s production, and the M4 is expected to be integrated into various Apple products.
One of the key features of the M4 chip is a floating-point AI unit, similar to what competitors like Qualcomm are already offering. Apple’s version is approximately 20% slower than Qualcomm’s, with a performance of 38 TOPS compared to Qualcomm’s 45 TOPS. This performance is comparable to the NPUs currently available in Intel Core Ultra Mobile CPUs.
The M4 chip comprises 4 high-performance cores and 6 energy-efficient cores. It is expected to deliver a 20-30% performance boost over its predecessor, the M3 chip. However, the M4 still lags behind the latest offerings from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm in terms of raw performance.
Unfortunately, the M4 generation does not support hyper-threading, limiting the maximum number of CPU threads to the total number of cores (4 high-performance + 6 energy-efficient). In comparison, Intel’s Core Ultra 7 and 9 CPUs support up to 22 threads, which is more than double what the M4 offers. This limitation may impact the performance of CPU-intensive multi-threaded applications.
Despite having the advantage of TSMC’s advanced 3nm technology, Apple’s progress with the M4 chip appears to be steady but underwhelming compared to its competitors. It is also worth noting that Intel’s upcoming Lunar Lake architecture is expected to provide a substantial 300% improvement in NPU performance over the M4.
Similar to its predecessor, the M4 chip’s integrated GPU supports ray-tracing and hardware-accelerated mesh shading. While the GPU cannot compete with modern discrete GPUs from Intel, AMD, or Nvidia in mobile devices, it provides a decent performance for an APU (Accelerated Processing Unit, APU vs CPU: Which Processor Type is Better for Gaming? ).
The M4 chip has been initially launched in the iPad Pro, and its integration into other Apple products is anticipated in the near future.