European Technology News on May 8: Apple officially released the M3 chip at the second autumn new product launch conference "Scary Fast" special event in 2023, and it ran out of a single-core score of 3100+ points in GeekBench 6, and the performance was quite outstanding and amazing.
At 10 p.m. Beijing time on May 7, Apple's 2024 spring conference, which has attracted much attention, showed its strength in self-developed chips in only 35 minutes. This conference can also be said to be a "special press conference" held by Apple for the iPad - "Apple's thinnest product", "the first iPad with an OLED screen", "the first Apple product with an M4 chip", "performance is proud of AI PC", "the industry's most advanced display" and other highlights are eye-catching.
This conference is also the first time that Apple has unveiled the M4 chip, which adopts a 4-core and 6-small core design, the CPU performance is up to 50% higher than that of M2, and the support of 10-core GPU brings graphics processing capabilities to a new level. Its support for ray tracing opens the door to a new world of gaming and professional applications for mobile devices.
The M4 chip is based on the 3nm process, 28 billion transistors, etc., and the NPU part has achieved a speed of 38 trillion operations per second, which is an astonishing 60 times higher than that of the A11, and at the same time, its memory bandwidth reaches 120GB per second, which can maintain high-performance output while consuming only a quarter of the energy consumption of traditional IPC processors.
The neural network engine of the M4 chip is mainly responsible for the machine learning part, such as face unlocking, image processing, etc., and Apple plans to greatly improve the design of this part of the M4 chip, including increasing the number of cores and improving the execution efficiency. It's not hard to see that Apple is finally recognizing the importance of AI in the current market.
2024 is destined to be the year of the rise of AI tablets, and whether the iPad can rise in this year and regain lost market share may not be seen until the end of this quarter.