Apple unveils enhanced versions of the M4 chip: what will they be capable of?

M4 Pro and M4 Max promise faster performance and efficiency.

It appears that the week of Apple MacBook announcements is over. After the release of iMac, Mac mini, and new MackBook Pros, we know everything Apple wanted to show us during its annual October product launch.

All of these devices will be powered by Apple's custom M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips. The chips are made on TSMC's second-generation 3-nanometer technology promising more efficiency with faster performance.

According to Apple, all of the central processing units (CPUs) in the M4 family feature the world’s fastest CPU core. The company claims that this core should deliver the industry’s best single-threaded performance as well as faster multithreaded performance.

Users have already had a chance to try out the M4 chip with the iPad Pro, which was announced this spring. However, many claimed that due to limited iPadOS capabilities, it was impossible to evaluate the M4 properly. It will be interesting to see how the M4 performs in MacOS, where it can better utilize its capabilities.

Enhanced versions of the M4, the M4 Pro and M4 Max, will power mid-range and premium versions of MacBooks.

How will they be different compared to the regular M4 chip?

Both chips will enable Thunderbolt 5 on the Mac for the first time, and unified memory bandwidth will reportedly be increased up to 75%. With Thunderbolt 5, Apple promises up to 120 Gb/s data transfer speeds, and more than doubles the throughput of Thunderbolt 4.

In addition, the new chips will bring an improved hardware-accelerated ray-tracing engine for better gaming and a Neural Engine that’s up to 2x faster than the previous generation for handling AI workloads.

The M4 Pro chip, which was first announced on Tuesday with a redesigned Mac mini, features an up to 14-core CPU consisting of up to 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores. Its GPU has up to 20 cores for graphics performance, that is 2x that of M4.

The chip also supports up to 64GB of RAM and 273GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is a 75% increase over M3 Pro.

Meanwhile, the M4 Max, which will power the high-end configurations of MacBooks, supports up to 128GB of RAM and up to 546GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The M4 Max has an up to 16-core CPU, with up to 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores, while the GPU of the M4 Max has up to 40 cores for performance.

What will those core numbers mean for users? Apple claims that workloads like de-noising raw video footage in DaVinci Resolve Studio will be able to run in real-time.

The first devices with the new chips, including the updated MacBook Pros, Mac minis, and iMacs, will be available starting November 8.