38 TOPS is quite a lot
As recent rumors claimed, Apple today unveiled the new iPad Pros based on the new M4 SoC. And she's technically quite curious.
To begin with, it’s worth recalling that the M3 debuted only in the fall, and it would hardly need a replacement… if not for artificial intelligence. M4 is designed specifically to offer excellent performance in AI tasks, and such features should arrive en masse in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 this fall.
That's why Apple gave the M4 a powerful NPU. Its performance is 38 TOPS. This is not a record — Snapdragon X Elite is more powerful in this regard — but Intel Meteor Lake NPU unit has a performance of 11 TOPS, and Ryzen 8040 — 16 TOPS. The M3 has 18 TOPS. However, the new Ryzen and Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake will have much more powerful NPU units, so the Apple M4 will lose its advantage before the end of this year. True, the Apple platform does not need to compete with anyone, since there will be no third-party products based on iPadOS.
Apple has quietly made the basic iPad much cheaper
Apple M4 is manufactured using a 3 nm process technology and contains 28 billion transistors. The processor of the new platform has 10 cores versus 8 cores in the M3. But the GPU has the same 10 cores, and it is not yet clear whether there are any architectural improvements. Apple itself compares the M4 with the M2, which is not without logic, since previous iPad Pros relied specifically on the M2.
M4 also offers 120 GB/s memory bandwidth, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and dynamic caching technology. M4 also brings AV1 hardware acceleration to iPad for the first time.