Apple today unveiled its new M4 Pro and M4 Max, two new chips that — in addition to the M4 — bring more power-efficiency, better performance, and advanced capabilities to the Mac. All three chips are based on TSMC’s second-generation 3-nanometer technology.
Apple says the CPUs across the M4 family feature the world’s fastest CPU core, delivering the industry’s best single-threaded performance, and dramatically faster multithreaded performance. The GPUs offer faster cores and a 2x faster ray-tracing engine. The M4 Pro and M4 Max enable Thunderbolt 5 for the Mac for the first time, and offers unified memory bandwidth increased up to 75 percent. The chips’ Neural Engine is up to 2x faster than the previous generation and includes enhanced machine learning accelerators in the CPUs.
“Apple silicon has taken the Mac to unprecedented heights, and the rapid pace of innovation continues with M4 Pro and M4 Max,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “With the world’s fastest CPU core, immensely more powerful GPUs, and the fastest Neural Engine ever, the power-efficient performance and capabilities of the M4 family extend its lead as the most advanced lineup of chips in the industry.”
The M4
The M4 features a more powerful 10-core CPU, with four performance cores and six efficiency cores, and a faster 10-core GPU with Apple’s most advanced graphics architecture. The M4’s Neural Engine is more than 3x more powerful than in M1. M4 supports up to 32GB of unified memory and has higher memory bandwidth of 120GB/s. The M4 also offers support for two high-resolution external displays in addition to the built-in display, and support for up to Thunderbolt 4 ports.
The M4 Pro
The M4 Pro features a 14-core CPU with 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores, as well as an up to a 20-core GPU that is twice as powerful as M4. The M4 Pro gets a 75% increase in memory bandwidth over the prior generation. The M4 Pro is up to 3x faster than the M1 Pro. The GPU features up to 20 cores for graphics performance that is 2x that of M4.
The M4 Pro supports up to 64GB of fast unified memory and 273GB/s of memory bandwidth, a 75% increase over M3 Pro. The M4 Pro also supports Thunderbolt 5 on the Mac, delivering up to 120Gb/s data transfer speeds, more than double the throughput of Thunderbolt 4.
The M4 Max
The M4 Max has an up to 16-core CPU, with up to 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores. It’s up to 2.2x faster than the CPU in M1 Max. The GPU has up to 40 cores for performance that is up to 1.9x faster than M1 Max.
M4 Max supports up to 128GB of fast unified memory and up to 546GB/s of memory bandwidth. The enhanced Media Engine of M4 Max includes two video encode engines and two ProRes accelerators. Like M4 Pro, M4 Max also supports Thunderbolt 5 with up to 120Gb/s data transfer capability.
