New Apple M4 chips set to help professionals across the spectrum in AI era

Apple’s latest chipsets are poised to support a wide range of professionals—including entrepreneurs, students, creators, data scientists, 3D artists, composers, and developers—by delivering more power-efficient performance and advanced features suited for the AI landscape.

The new M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips utilize cutting-edge second-generation 3-nanometer technology, enhancing both performance and energy efficiency.

Apple claims that the CPUs in the M4 series feature the fastest CPU core available, achieving the best single-threaded performance in the industry and significantly improved multithreaded performance.

The GPUs build upon the advanced graphics architecture from the previous generation, featuring faster cores and a ray-tracing engine that is twice as fast.

For the first time, M4 Pro and M4 Max enable Thunderbolt 5 connectivity on Macs, while unified memory bandwidth has been boosted by up to 75%.

“The M4 chip family, combined with a Neural Engine that is up to twice as fast as its predecessor and enhanced machine learning (ML) accelerators in the CPUs, delivers exceptional performance for professional and AI tasks,” the company stated.

The M4 chip offers up to a 10-core CPU, consisting of four performance cores and up to six efficiency cores, making it up to 1.8 times faster than the M1. This allows for seamless multitasking across applications like Safari and Excel. Its 10-core GPU provides remarkable graphics performance, up to twice as fast as the M1, ensuring smooth operations for photo editing and high-end gaming.

The M4 supports up to 32GB of unified memory and offers a memory bandwidth of 120GB/s.

The M4 Pro builds on the technologies of the M4, scaling them for users with more intensive workflows, such as researchers, developers, and creative professionals. It features an up to 14-core CPU with as many as 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores, making it up to 1.9 times faster than the M1 Pro and 2.1 times faster than the latest AI PC chip.

The M4 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory and has a memory bandwidth of 273GB/s, a 75% increase over the M3 Pro and twice the bandwidth of any AI PC chip.

For those at the cutting edge, the M4 Max is ideal for data scientists, 3D artists, and composers, featuring an up to 16-core CPU with up to 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores. It is up to 2.2 times faster than the M1 Max CPU and 2.5 times faster than the latest AI PC chip.

The M4 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory and boasts an impressive memory bandwidth of 546GB/s, which is four times that of the latest AI PC chip, enabling developers to easily work with large language models containing nearly 200 billion parameters.

According to Apple, the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max are specifically designed for enhancing AI capabilities.