Apple held its anticipated iPad event today, and the most attention-grabbing 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 Arm-compatible M4 – coming just months after Cupertino released the M3 - has some heft. The 3nm-node processor has four performance and six efficiency CPU cores, all of which include ML accelerators.
The M4 also has a 10-core GPU that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the iPad and speeds up rendering times; Apple alleged the silicon can deliver the same performance as an equivalent GPU in a "thin and light laptop" with a fourth of the power draw.
The Neural Engine in the M4 raised a few eyebrows: According to Apple, the M4's NPU is capable of 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS), presumably using INT8. If that peak figure is correct, it's faster than AMD's Ryzen 8040 series, with its 16 TOPS or Intel Meteor Lake, which has an NPU able to reach 11 TOPS. Intel Lunar Lake, which will have an NPU able to reach 45 TOPS, won't be out until the end of next year.\
Then there's the Qualcomm X Elite family coming to laptops this year and also said to hit 45 TOPS. Apple said its M4 was 50 percent faster than the M2 on CPU performance, and four times faster in GPU performance; Cupertino skipped over the M3 comparison because, well, you can imagine why.
"The Neural Engine in M4 is Apple's most capable yet, and is more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC today," Apple boasted in a news release about the M4 - and it might be right - at least for now.
To read more, click here.