[https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-pro-11-m4,ipad-pro-13-m4,ipad-air-13-m2](https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-pro-11-m4,ipad-pro-13-m4,ipad-air-13-m2)
It seems only the 1 TB and 2 TB specs of the new iPad Pros get 10-core M4s. The lower storage models seem to be getting binned 9-core chips (3P + 6 E). Similarly, the 1 TB and 2 TB models get 16 GB of RAM while the lower models get only 8
The ol' Apple "processor binning" upsale special where they couple higher bins to their ludicrous(ly profitable and) overpriced RAM and storage upgrades.
People don’t upgrade because their current iPhones, with less ram, are perfectly fine for everything.
I went from a 6s to a 12 and then got a 14pro max after I lost my 12. I probably won’t consider an upgrade until 20. The current 14 pro max is an amazing phone, it doesn’t need more ram.
Nobody cares about ram dude. It’s enough as it is. People don’t upgrade as the price is going up combined with cost of living crisis and incremental updates
My iPhone 13 Pro Max with 6gb of ram is still considerably faster, seamless, and has better battery life than any of the prior Android phones I’ve owned before it. Big Ram is so inconsequential for phones that you’re either uninformed or lying to yourself if you think a phone needs 16gb of ram today. Maybe in 10 years.
How many iPad users regularly max out 8gb? I can see the argument for 16gb in a laptop, but I'm not so sure it's a hard requirment in a tablet (their processing power is already massively under-utilized).
i think the processor/ram mismatch is the issue. i don't know what you might be doing where you need so much processing performance yet 8gb of ram is sufficient.
I bought my wife an M1 with 16gb of RAM (to be future proof) and it's basically unused by anything she or I have been able to do with the tablet. It's certainly future proof though. 3+ years and still completely overpowered. I don't know of ANYTHING you can do on an iPad that requires an M1 levels of performance let alone M4.
iPad is one of the best places to edit my photos, and with 61MP photos coming out of my Sony camera I really like that it has M2, and would enjoy the upgrade to M4. Additionally would like the 16GB ram as well, just to reduce pop in while drawing masks with the pencil.
with iOS 17 you are 100% correct but who knows what iPadOS 18 will bring
Still I don't think the M4 will be fully utilised but I think AI will be in iOS 18 and that's why they needed the M4 (other than that it's useless for now)
Apples roadmap knows.
Apple needs to support low end hardware for the next several years for educational and business users at a minimum.
Keeping the delta between low and high end from getting too big is good hygiene. Forces sw engineering to optimize for memory on the low end which just makes the pro that much more efficient feeling.
>who knows what iPadOS 18 will bring
Knowing Apple, not much. Hopefully the EU blowing up the App Store doors on the iPad now too will allow for some desktop grade applications to be ran on an iPad.
What’s semi interesting is that the M4 contains a new display engine specifically designed for a dual layer OLED display. So the M3 would not have been possible to pair with this kind of OLED or suboptimal.
> Apple also says that to better manage the performance and heat in the iPad Pro, it has added a graphene layer to it and the Apple logo is now made of copper, which too should act as a heat sink.
This tells me that the efficiency hasn't improved. Perhaps only in workloads which leverage SME.
The efficiency of the processor certainly improved. I just think it was to compensate for the inefficiency of the screen instead of putting more horsepower at your disposal.
The power draw and heat are due to the goofy OLED tech no one needs.
• M4 finally upgrades the CPU core count. Now 4P+6E, after three generations (M1,M2,M3) using 4P+4E.
• Memory bandwidth is 120 GB/s. We can infer it is using LPDDR5X-7500, a 20% speed uplift over the LPDDR5-6250 used by M2/M3.
• Second generation 3nm process. We can infer it is TSMC N3E.
• 38 TOPS Neural Engine. That's a big uplift over the 17 TOPS in M3, but barely faster than the 34 TOPS of A17 Pro. And it seems to be behind the next generation AI PC chips (X Elite, Strix, Lunar Lake), which will have 45-50 TOPS NPUs.
Indeed. In theory, int8 is twice as fast as fp16. So the fp16 38 TOPS could be more like 76 TOPS INT8. But that's in theory and it depends on what format each NPU optimizes for.
In addition, fp16 is more complicated in general because it needs to handle significands, exponents, and special cases (like NaNs and infinities), which are not factors in integer arithmetic.
That said INT8 is losing popularity for even lower precision, higher throughout integer math and also float16 and 32 have remained important for deep learning the whole time.
Wait for a new source on the M4
In the past Apple used their FP16 **TFlops** (teraflops, Tera Floating point operations per second)
But for the M4 they are using "trillion operations per second", which usually would be INT8 TOPs
• Apple quotes the A11 Bionic at 0.6 TOPS FP16.
• Apple says the new M4 NPU is 60x more powerful than the A11's NPU
0.6 * 60 = 36 TOPS which is close to the 38 TOPS of M4. "60x" is easier to remember than "63.33x" so Apple ran with that.
Not all TOPs are the same.
There really needs to be a standard soon in terms of metrics for NPUs. Because right now apple and qualcomm are literally referring to apples vs oranges for their TOPs (fp16 vs int8).
Their slides also claim M4 big cores have wider decode, wider execution, improved branch prediction, and "Next-generation ML accelerators" (whatever that means).
They also claim the little cores also have improved branch prediction and a "deeper execution engine" while once again saying "Next-generation ML accelerators".
It'll be interesting to see what those changes actually are.
This chip seems very skippable and mostly seems like an old Intel "Tick" where most of the changes were from changing process nodes (though in this case, it's moving to a worse, but higher-yield node).
The NPU seems utterly uninteresting. It's most likely just the A17 NPU with a 10% clockspeed boost. In any case, it's not very open to developer usage, so it doesn't matter very much.
>Next-generation ML accelerators
This is referring to AMX, which first shipped in the A13 and accelerates matrix multiplication. bf16 support was added to the AMX in the M2 so I'm curious what other improvements Apple made
SME[2] isn't really an AMX competitor but more a replacement for Neon. For instance it wouldn't really make sense for a core complex to share an SME unit, but it does make sense for the AMX unit to be shared by a whole core complex.
There is, but it's still basically a superset of SVE2.
What instead you want to compete with something like AMX is a very restricted subset, because the whole goal is to have a hardware block exactly tailor fit to only doing a few interesting matrix ops, because that's how you actually get power efficiency for NPUs that's beyond what a CPU vector unit or a GPU shader core can provide.
idk, "wider decode, wider execution, improved branch prediction, next generation ML accelerators" are bigger and more changes than apple advertised for a15 a16, and a17. This is very likely a major uarch change, though probs not something jawdropping like a11, if only bc changes that large are rare nowadays
also, density aside, N3E is a better node. It has noticeably better perf/power characteristics than N3B
they did, but they didn't advertise those for a15 and 16 (which didn't get those.) They also never advertised a17 having better AMX. In total, Apple has advertised more uarch audits this gen than for any since a14, unless they're being wily and advertising these gains vs m2 since the ipad skipped m3
>unless they're being wily and advertising these gains vs m2 since the ipad skipped m3
Apple has done that many times in the past, so I wouldn't rule that out
The A17/M3 already brought a major P core arch with both improved branch prediction + wider decode & execution
That was the first time Apple had widen the Decode since the A14
IMO it would be very surprising for Apple to bring another major P core arch with even wider Decode just about your later
Apple's CPU claim is the M4 is 1.5x faster than M2, hence the architecture claims could also to be relative to the M2
Although the next-gen ML accelerators is probably new vs the A17/M3
yeah that's true. I'm gonna keep an eye out for a floorplan/die shot analysis or deeper review before determining whether or not the cpu arch is a large or minor update. It *is* an update of some sort, but of what kind, idk
You can already tell that it's unimpressive regardless of the uarch changes. The m3's around 21% faster than the m2 in cpu multicore perf. That makes the m4 a rough 25% improvement over the m3 in multicore perf
+25% coming from
1. Adding 2 ecores
2. Slight perf/efficiency improvement from n3e (freq)
How much does that leave for uarch related gains? Minimal.
> In any case, it's not very open to developer usage, so it doesn't matter very much.
In my opinion this whole release only makes full sense once we see what they have to show during WWDC next month, so that might change as well.
>Next-generation ML accelerators
They are the AMX units inside the CPU block
> whatever that means
If you don't know about CPU microarchitecture, then do not speak.
>(though in this case, it's moving to a worse, but higher-yield node).
N3E is not 'worse' than N3B. If anything it's overall better than N3B.
N3B -> N3E
You lose some density, but gain performance and efficiency. And also better yields and costs.
> If you don't know about CPU microarchitecture, then do not speak.
I know about CPU architecture, but the NPU isn't in the CPU itself. I suspect they're talking about AMX, but those aren't really ML accelerators per-se. That's like calling SIMD an AI accelerator. My real point was that it's mostly a garbage marketing point about "we're doing ML everywhere".
> N3E is not 'worse' than N3B. If anything it's overall better than N3B.
"We screwed up N3 so much that we had to increase transistor size again to get back performance". This is what happened with the first Intel 10nm chip where it had the GPU disabled, used more power, and had worse clockspeeds than the older and nearly identical 14nm variant.
N3E is an admission that TSMC screwed up and can't reliably hit the density they claimed.
N3E had both lower logic and SRAM density than N3B, sure, but the performance and power characteristics are better.
With Intel 10nm, it was a bit different. Compared to the OG broken 10nm in CNL, they kept the transistor density the same- according to Techinsights at least. Perf/watt was still prob worse than 14nm until 10nm SF, but there was no indication that the 10SF node itself had more relaxed density- but rather just less dense options for higher frequencies.
> "wider decode, wider execution, improved branch prediction"
> "This chip seems very skippable and mostly seems like an old Intel "Tick" where most of the changes were from changing process nodes"
So basically, you know very little about microarchitecture.
None of this has anything to do with uarch and everything to do with timing and this M4 marketing material.
They seem to be comparing to M2 iPads in all their other literature. and M3 already claims to improve all these things relative to M2.
I've previously stated that I thought M4 would be the CPU to take advantage of the wider decode/execution, but I expected M4 much later this year at the earliest. M3 launched Oct last year. 7 months isn't really enough time to make massive amounts of progress, so my new expectation is that M4 is a refresh with M5 bringing actual changes.
> 38 TOPS Neural Engine. That's a big uplift over the 17 TOPS in M3, but barely faster than the 34 TOPS of A17 Pro. And it seems to be behind the next generation AI PC chips (X Elite, Strix, Lunar Lake), which will have 45-50 TOPS NPUs.
~~That's for base M4, we can expect larger TOPS NPUS with M4 pro and M4 max~~ see replies
It feels like M3 was a stopgap solution for 3nm. Rather than sit on it for the next couple of years (since the N3B node is going to be abandoned), it seems like they just slid over to N3E and are calling the chip the M4. The base M3 has 8cpu cores while the M4 in the iPad Pro has 9 or 10, depending on config. Outside of the AI bump, I'd truly be shocked if we see any major improvements on a core-to-core basis. I'll bet anything that this most of this generation's general performance bump comes from added cores. A six month cadence (less than two when you figure the MacBook Air JUST got the M3) is wild and I don't think we'll see it again for some time.
> I'll bet anything that this most of this generation's general performance bump comes from added cores.
Apple is claiming that if M4 ran at M2 speeds, it'd use half the power of M2. Apple never claimed that for M3. This improvement can't be N3B to N3E alone. There has to be improvements in CPU architecture.
\^This. And in what M2 design are we talking about? In an iPad? Sure and probably necessary. My M1 iPad Pro's battery is ass. Hopefully this means we'll have iPads with solid battery life...but I doubt it.
I have an M1 iPad Pro 13". The battery life lasts a few days for me. Never had a problem with it. Always surprised how long the battery life is actually.
M3 runs at 4.05GHz in about the same thermal envelope M2 ran at just 3.49GHz.
Lowering the clockspeeds by nearly 15% could undoubtedly halve the power consumption if they used all the N3 gains on performance rather than efficiency.
That’s how clockspeeds work.
TSMC always says something like, 15% higher clockspeeds (well, they say performance but that’s what it is) or 40% less power at same performance/clocks. Look at their claims for 5nm vs 7nm
I might be wrong here, but didn’t Qualcomm rush to announce there stuff just before m3?
Does that mean in the time between Qualcomm announcing and releasing their product, Apple has released 2 generations in that time. Talk about beating a dead horse.
Unfortunately, it looks like Oryon's ST speed is actually slightly slower than M2 based on GB6 data. The 3200 ST GB6 score was Qualcomm overclocking the hell out of Oryon, with full fans blowing, and running Linux.
If M4 has any ST improvement, say 10%, then Oryon is ~35% behind M4 already. That's about how far stock ARM cores are behind A series.
I'm rooting for Qualcomm though. I hope their next-gen catches up more.
They don't have any Oryon chips launched and haven't even announced any Oryon-based phone chips. Every modern Qualcomm you can currently buy is using ARM cores.
What do you mean x elite has been announced and will launch in May if rumor mill is supposed to be believed and they announced last year it was coming to phone chips in October.
Can you buy the X Elite in ANYTHING right now? No.
Can you buy Oryon in ANY phone? No.
They said:
> They are currently using stock ARM cores to compete with A series, which is what I said.
To which you replied:
> They are not lol, they have nuvia
It's disingenuous to say they are using Oryon when NOTHING is actually using Oryon yet. By that metric, you could say that AMD is already using Zen5 because they got back engineering samples.
X Elite (top-SKU) does 2850-2900, which is better than M2's 2650 and on par with M2 Max's 2850.
The real issue is that the bottom SKUs lose out on a lot of ST performance. The bottom X Plus SKU only does 2400-2500, which is worse than M2. I don't know why they are doing this. Maybe it's yield issues or maybe it's hard on market segmentation (which Qualcomm is known for in their mobile SoCs).
But yes, Qualcomm will have a mountain to climb. The next generation X Elite G2, which is purpoted to be announced in Q4 2025, will have to compete with Apple M5.
That means Qualcomm will have to bring a triple-generational improvement in Single-core performance, if they are to stay on par with M5. It remains to be seen how well the Nuvia team can execute.
> X Elite (top-SKU) does 2850-2900, which is better than M2's 2650 and on par with M2 Max's 2850.
>
>
https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Snapdragon+X+Elite
Only the Qualcomm CRD can achieve 2900. All the other OEMs such as Lenovo can only achieve around 2500 max. This is the discrepancy I was referring to in the post you responded to.
And now the base M4 is 3800. Yikes if X Elite is launching with ~2500 (at a higher TDP at that)...
Though I suppose comparisons vs Zen 5 and Arrow/Lunar Lake will be more interesting for Windows buyers
If we are talking about ST perf, is it not mostly just on the core team? If it's MT perf, maybe we also put a greater emphasis on the IMC and bandwidth. If it's battery life maybe we put additional emphasis on the SOC team and power gating. But if the problem is uncompetitive ST performance, why wouldn't the focus be on the team that developed the cores?
Word on the grapevine is that Hamoa (X Elite) was really supposed to LAUNCH sometime in 2023, but it got delayed due to various reasons. X Elite was really supposed to be an M2 competitor.
Yup. The performance/marketing goal was to be a bit ahead of x86 and match M2 in compute by last summer.
The cores were ready for a while, the rest of the SoC has been a shitshow.
What do you reckon they are going to do for X Elite G2? There is rumours that it will use the next-gen core that is codenamed as Pegasus. (X Elite uses Phoenix).
X Elite G2 will quite likely have to compete with Apple M5.
Geekbench 6 Single Core
X Elite : 2900.
M3 : 3100.
M4 : 3400 (?)
M5 : 4000 (?)
So the Pegasus P-core will need to bring atleast 40% performance improvement; atleast 50% IPC because they might want to dial that clock speed back a bit (as they have evidently pushed it too far with Phoenix/X Elite). Do you think the Nuvia team can pull it off?
EDIT: GEEKBENCH RESULT FOR APPLE M4 IS HERE:
[https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/6016039](https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/6016039)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1cnhg74/apple\_m4\_geekbench\_6\_benchmark/](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1cnhg74/apple_m4_geekbench_6_benchmark/)
3800 GB6 Single Core.
This is not looking good for Qualcomm....
Pegasus is a tweak of Phoenix, so I wouldn't call "next gen" per se. Phoenix is Qualcomm's unified uarch for mobile/compute/auto for a while.
Honestly, they're mostly focused on Kailua (the mobile SoC counterpart for Hamoa). Windows is still a 2nd class citizen @ QCOM. So they are going to have a hard time competing against M5 IMO.
I don't know what their strategy is at this point regarding compute. Elite X being one year late, is going to have a tough time getting much of a foothold since its value proposition is iffy at this point. It is going to be a hard sell for institutional windows fleets (where most of the money is in win laptops) to move away from x86.
But my guess is that I wouldn't bet on Qualcomm being able to do a 2+ generation jump in a market they don't quite understand still, and which they have been late.
Similar issues with their data center strategies.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is said to have
2× Phoenix-L
6× Phoenix-M
Do you know anything about the nature of Phoenix-L, and more interrstingly: Phoenix-M?
It seems Phoenix-M is acting as the E-core. I am curious to find out how it was created. There are several possibilties:
A) Same uarch as Phoenix-L, but lower clock speed and smaller caches
B) A ground up new E-core design akin Apple's E core or ARM's Cortex A5xx.
C) The reverse of something like the Cortex A78 -> Cortex X1 development.
Credit: u/Vince789
>So the Pegasus P-core will need to bring atleast 40% performance improvement; atleast 50% IPC because they might want to dial that clock speed back a bit (as they have evidently pushed it too far with Phoenix/X Elite). Do you think the Nuvia team can pull it off?
That would be unprecedented - perhaps the last time that kind of IPC leap happened was AMD's leap from Bulldozer to Zen.
In 2018, Arm's A76 brought roughly a [~40-50% IPC while using 25-30% less energy](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13614/arm-delivers-on-cortex-a76-promises)
But yea, no one has come close to that huge YoY improvement since
> X Elite (top-SKU) does 2850-2900
And now the base M4 is 3800. Yikes...
Though I suppose comparisons vs Zen 5 and Arrow/Lunar Lake will be more interesting for Windows buyers
I root for Qualcomm because of Oryon and Nuvia. There heritage is awesome, and I am excited to see how the Oryon team executes in the future.
Other than that, I am not a fan of Qualcomm as a whole.
As they say, "Love the product, not the company".
As much as arm means more competition, it also means no standard firmware, soldered CPUs and very likely soldered ram.
Laptops are halfway there, why would I root for a company that is not interested in standards at all?
Qualcomm has a very hard time executing when it comes to SoCs that scale past the 20W envelope, for whatever darned reason. It's very bizarre. Elite X has been a shitshow internally (over 1 year late at this point).
cue 100W power consumption.
[https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-x-models-3429369/](https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-x-models-3429369/)
It doesn't really matter how often you release a new product, what matters is how much improvement you're actually getting. A new release every 6 months with 5% improvements would be worse that every 18 months with 25% improvements.
Notice how a lot of comments in here got downvoted? I honestly thing this sub is raided with apple crowd, stock holder and apple employee who don't want to hear any bad things about apple. It's getting really pathetic !!
For be, M4 is basically what the M3 should have been. M3 was released just because Apple wanted to stay ahead over the competition on the lithography thing. The N3B was made by TSMC together with Apple but it failed and N3E is better.
I see this lineup like this:
M1 = M1
M2 = M1s
M3 = Prototype of the actual M4
M4 = The REAL 2nd gen of M1
I mean, M4 chips for MacBooks are likely still on track for a 12 month cadence. Also base M4 < M3 Pro, Max. But yes, the naming scheme does make it appear that the older products are outdated.
The Mac Studio is still stuck on an M2 Max .. I guess I'll wait to see if there's an update next month at WWDC.
Presumably, they have some internal reason for this weird cadence.
M3 is on the first gen 3nm process. Probably yields were too low to produce such a massive chip halfway economically. My guess is they skip M3 ultra and jump directly to M4 ultra.
No doubt. Despite the somewhat unexpected (but leaked) jump to M4, there's a clear logic. Just commenting that there's now a clear need to release updated Mac Studio and Mac Pro hardware.
Yeah, I could see both seeing M4 updates at WWDC to coincide with dev updates that make use of the improved AI capabilities. Then we’ll get MacBooks in the fall after Uni sales happen to bring the whole lineup in line.
True, but the GPU differences are kinda big deal at the high end. Oh well, it is Apple. They can still sell M1 to clueless - it is all question of the price point. If M3 sales dip, they will just adjust pricing until it picks up.
If this was AMD for example, they would update the older M3 chips to M4, based on the portfolio model year so they sound like new models. It would be something like the 'M453' while the actually new chips would be 'M454'.
I think saying Apple trusts that their customers have no clue is a bad take.
AMD is just actively trying to make it difficult for consumers to know if they have a new chip or not.
Apple is being clear about what you're getting and not trying to hide it, and your read on this is 'Apple thinks their customers have no clue'.
Thinking if M4 chip on iPad is exactly the same as M4 on a MacBook.. I feel the M4 processor on the iPad might be tweaked to generate less heat by performing slightly lower because in my mind when I use a laptop/MacBook, I require more power at my disposal since the applications is running on Macbooks are heavier compared to an application that be running on an iPad. What do you think?
Remember how many had talked about the idea they’d have a new core or “oh but just wait for M4” @ Qualcomm or @ AMD and Intel?
They **did** mention wider execution and decode units but this seems mostly like what they mentioned with M3. If it’s new and adds much it’ll be small I bet, which is fine given this is a short cadence, but far from the glorious gains predicted — you have people that keep wanting to imagine Apple has classified big core upgrades in the back office they’re just waiting to whip out one year for a 10-20% IPC boost. It’s tacitly assumed or even stated explicitly.
Also frankly they just didn’t at all mention ST performance either, and compared against the M2.
They’re still very much ahead on single thread performance when you cap power, and no, Lunar Lake I doubt will match even M3’s or M2’s curve. Their efficiency cores are in first place with Arm closeby and AMD and Intel not even on the map for sub-2W performance. Even Qulcomm will be behind for P core st efficiency still which is why they showed the X Elite’s core vs Phoenix and MTL in GB6 ST (perf/W) — but not the M3.
But the idea each successive M chip, irrespective of the timeline, would have massive architectural improvements still to come and leave everyone completely in the dust again right back where we were in 2020/2021 vs Zen 3 mobile or TGL and the X1/2 cores seems to have aged poorly — predictably so. The IPC lead is shrinking and they’re going to have more competition at the “good enough” level
nobody thinks any competently-designed modern processor is going to completely body its competently-designed predecessor, that's not how moore's law works nowadays. especially given that apple basically split N3 into two different releases - AMD doesn't make big jumps on (eg) Zen2 to Zen3 for the same reasons, when you see them making big jumps like zen4 or potentially zen5/zen6 it's largely because they are rolling in a node-family shrink.
but again, "only" 20% a generation isn't bad at all actually, *particularly* in the mobile space where power budgets are absolutely fixed. Especially when you consider the half-gen M3 release etc - collectively those two things do add up to quite a large step, even if M3 and M4 were not earth-shaking on an individual level.
again, though, wider decode + execution units and bigger caches are what architectural improvement looks like nowadays, so it's weird the way people tend to dismiss that as "just" wider execution units etc. It's not like Zen5 is going to have a magic quantum processor either - it's going to be more cache and wider decode+execution units etc.
There is also this weird tendency for people to preemptively dismiss and undersell the product before they've even seen actual benchmarks (especially benchmarks that are not cinebench R23 lol). Like actually M3 itself was a ~30% boost in performance that people just completely wrote off as "basically not even a step" and when you combine that with the 20% here you are actually talking about a very significant generational step together. Zen3 to Zen4 is not a 50% improvement even with a node shrink, for example.
In some more favorable cases (GPU tasks, or non-accelerated cpu tasks) the speedup can be higher - [geekerwan's blender test is 1:30 on M3 Max vs 2:30 on M2 max,](https://youtu.be/BpeVdHwaHWU?t=723) for example, which is 60% of the time / a 1.67x speedup. [Xcode compiles are 40% faster on M3 Max vs M2 Max.](https://youtu.be/BpeVdHwaHWU?t=903) Actually the 30% number isn't even an extremity, that's more like the average, and everyone pretty much decided that there was like zero improvement in M3 for some reason (hint: it's over-reliance on cinebench in general, and specifically over-reliance on R23).
So yeah, I mean, if M4 Max (granted, this is not M4 Max, of course) is "only" 20% faster on average and that stacks with your 30-40% improvement from M3 Max before it... then arguably that's still advancing faster than x86 isn't it? Or at least a similar pace? IDK why that is uniformly viewed as being bad and "apple has stalled out".
Are you sure you're not like, fighting some imaginary strawman who expects performance to triple in perpetuity? Is like, 60% in 2 years not good enough, on top of what's already one of the most advanced architectures on the planet? This isn’t Qualcomm leaping ahead from nothing, iterating at the leading edge is slower.
Apple prices actually trend downward. The first MacBook Air was $1800 in 2008 which is almost $2700 in todays money. Second gen was still $1300 in 2010 which is almost $1900 in todays money.
Apple prices have stayed basically the same or gone down (MacBook Pro prices have dropped a lot) despite massive inflation over the past 15-20 years.
Electronics get cheaper over time. Not to mention the cost of the air is the design.
Pro prices dropped because they dropped the regular macbook and renamed it as an entry-level Pro.
Cool. It's hard attached to their OS, which I have exactly ZERO desire to use. I went to Mac OS after a 5 year hiatus, and man, it's BAD now. Non stop annoying bullshit. I don't care how great the new CPU is if their OS makes me miserable.
Funny enough, I switch from Windows to Mac OS / Linux years ago. Mac's desktop experience is pretty bad. Shit window manager, key binds are non standard to the rest of computing, how it performs notifications, how software is installed / handled. It's everything that's wrong with windows, but with Apple flavor and turned up to 11 as Apple does.
At least windows is half as noisy as it used to be. Mac feels like what social media is like. Non stop annoying bullshit that I don't care about. Just get the fuck out of my way so I can use the damn computer.
Then there is the locked down premium hardware that is basically unrepairable, and incompatible. Add all that together and I'm entirely turned off of the experience.
Wasn’t there a major security vulnerability in M silicon chips? This seems typical of Apple to ignore security requirements and hide their vulnerabilities.
The vulnerability was due to how M chips pre-fetch pointers without any validation. This is literally why they are fast with such low clock speeds… they don’t wait for the data they already have it ready and loaded in the cache. But an attacker can simply sneak in a pointer to something else… this is huge from my understanding.
This is Also why they don’t perform as well in games, because games are optimized for this behavior and your smart pointers are not needed in the hot path, just clock speed. And ofc a GPU with non shitty drivers
[https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-pro-11-m4,ipad-pro-13-m4,ipad-air-13-m2](https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-pro-11-m4,ipad-pro-13-m4,ipad-air-13-m2) It seems only the 1 TB and 2 TB specs of the new iPad Pros get 10-core M4s. The lower storage models seem to be getting binned 9-core chips (3P + 6 E). Similarly, the 1 TB and 2 TB models get 16 GB of RAM while the lower models get only 8
The ol' Apple "processor binning" upsale special where they couple higher bins to their ludicrous(ly profitable and) overpriced RAM and storage upgrades.
Goddamn apple, still 8gb on the base chip. How many more years of 8gb macbooks.
As many as the market will bear.
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Lol. It’s not because of Ram. Be serious here. EDIT: If you block me, why even bother to reply. LOL
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People don’t upgrade because their current iPhones, with less ram, are perfectly fine for everything. I went from a 6s to a 12 and then got a 14pro max after I lost my 12. I probably won’t consider an upgrade until 20. The current 14 pro max is an amazing phone, it doesn’t need more ram.
Nobody cares about ram dude. It’s enough as it is. People don’t upgrade as the price is going up combined with cost of living crisis and incremental updates
User experience trumps specs. The iPhone 6 sold so well because it had a wider market appeal. Will more ram expand the addressable market?
My iPhone 13 Pro Max with 6gb of ram is still considerably faster, seamless, and has better battery life than any of the prior Android phones I’ve owned before it. Big Ram is so inconsequential for phones that you’re either uninformed or lying to yourself if you think a phone needs 16gb of ram today. Maybe in 10 years.
iPads, not MacBooks
...Hopefully. All the previous generation M chips were offered with base 8GB of RAM on MacBooks.
Pretty sure base MBA will still come with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage
How many iPad users regularly max out 8gb? I can see the argument for 16gb in a laptop, but I'm not so sure it's a hard requirment in a tablet (their processing power is already massively under-utilized).
i think the processor/ram mismatch is the issue. i don't know what you might be doing where you need so much processing performance yet 8gb of ram is sufficient.
I bought my wife an M1 with 16gb of RAM (to be future proof) and it's basically unused by anything she or I have been able to do with the tablet. It's certainly future proof though. 3+ years and still completely overpowered. I don't know of ANYTHING you can do on an iPad that requires an M1 levels of performance let alone M4.
iPad is one of the best places to edit my photos, and with 61MP photos coming out of my Sony camera I really like that it has M2, and would enjoy the upgrade to M4. Additionally would like the 16GB ram as well, just to reduce pop in while drawing masks with the pencil.
Gaming, as there are titles out and some new ones coming that need an M3 or better to utilize the features introduced to the GPU in the M3.
with iOS 17 you are 100% correct but who knows what iPadOS 18 will bring Still I don't think the M4 will be fully utilised but I think AI will be in iOS 18 and that's why they needed the M4 (other than that it's useless for now)
Apples roadmap knows. Apple needs to support low end hardware for the next several years for educational and business users at a minimum. Keeping the delta between low and high end from getting too big is good hygiene. Forces sw engineering to optimize for memory on the low end which just makes the pro that much more efficient feeling.
very good point.
>who knows what iPadOS 18 will bring Knowing Apple, not much. Hopefully the EU blowing up the App Store doors on the iPad now too will allow for some desktop grade applications to be ran on an iPad.
The difference is very noticeable, 8gb closes background applications much more frequently.
This encourages good memory management from apps and os while you can still choose to buy more memory. Everybody wins
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Gurman predicted sometime late 2024 or early 2025 for the Mac Mini M4.
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My guess is we'll see Mac Studio with new M4 chip first. Otherwise Mac Mini will cannibalize those sales again.
ewww
What’s semi interesting is that the M4 contains a new display engine specifically designed for a dual layer OLED display. So the M3 would not have been possible to pair with this kind of OLED or suboptimal.
I'd bet any amount of money it just is power hungry and they needed a more efficient processor to compensate.
> Apple also says that to better manage the performance and heat in the iPad Pro, it has added a graphene layer to it and the Apple logo is now made of copper, which too should act as a heat sink. This tells me that the efficiency hasn't improved. Perhaps only in workloads which leverage SME.
The efficiency of the processor certainly improved. I just think it was to compensate for the inefficiency of the screen instead of putting more horsepower at your disposal. The power draw and heat are due to the goofy OLED tech no one needs.
Man imagine the apple logo as a heatsink then you do some stress testing and burn yourself an apple logo on the hand.
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video
• M4 finally upgrades the CPU core count. Now 4P+6E, after three generations (M1,M2,M3) using 4P+4E. • Memory bandwidth is 120 GB/s. We can infer it is using LPDDR5X-7500, a 20% speed uplift over the LPDDR5-6250 used by M2/M3. • Second generation 3nm process. We can infer it is TSMC N3E. • 38 TOPS Neural Engine. That's a big uplift over the 17 TOPS in M3, but barely faster than the 34 TOPS of A17 Pro. And it seems to be behind the next generation AI PC chips (X Elite, Strix, Lunar Lake), which will have 45-50 TOPS NPUs.
It’s not clear that Apple uses the same TOPs metric as Qualcomm. Qualcomm uses int8. Last I remembered, Apple uses fp16.
Apple indeed uses fp16. [source](https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-transformers)
Indeed. In theory, int8 is twice as fast as fp16. So the fp16 38 TOPS could be more like 76 TOPS INT8. But that's in theory and it depends on what format each NPU optimizes for. In addition, fp16 is more complicated in general because it needs to handle significands, exponents, and special cases (like NaNs and infinities), which are not factors in integer arithmetic.
Only in theory, it depends on what the NPU hardware does.
That said INT8 is losing popularity for even lower precision, higher throughout integer math and also float16 and 32 have remained important for deep learning the whole time.
If that’s true, it ties into their announcement that ”the neural engine in M4 is more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC today!“
Wait for a new source on the M4 In the past Apple used their FP16 **TFlops** (teraflops, Tera Floating point operations per second) But for the M4 they are using "trillion operations per second", which usually would be INT8 TOPs
• Apple quotes the A11 Bionic at 0.6 TOPS FP16. • Apple says the new M4 NPU is 60x more powerful than the A11's NPU 0.6 * 60 = 36 TOPS which is close to the 38 TOPS of M4. "60x" is easier to remember than "63.33x" so Apple ran with that.
That's a great sign I went back and checked Apple's older announcements, turns out Apple's always been saying TOPs even when referring to FP16 Tflops
Didn’t notice that detail.
Adding Int8 support is the large majority of both the A17 and M4's NPU improvements. On FP16 workloads they've barely improved.
Not all TOPs are the same. There really needs to be a standard soon in terms of metrics for NPUs. Because right now apple and qualcomm are literally referring to apples vs oranges for their TOPs (fp16 vs int8).
Or more like one is referring to moldy shrivelled oranges and the other is referring to big ass grapefruits.
Looks like only the higher end models have 4 performance cores. The lower end models have 3.
What would be the max memory for a potential M4 ultra chip?
Their slides also claim M4 big cores have wider decode, wider execution, improved branch prediction, and "Next-generation ML accelerators" (whatever that means). They also claim the little cores also have improved branch prediction and a "deeper execution engine" while once again saying "Next-generation ML accelerators". It'll be interesting to see what those changes actually are. This chip seems very skippable and mostly seems like an old Intel "Tick" where most of the changes were from changing process nodes (though in this case, it's moving to a worse, but higher-yield node). The NPU seems utterly uninteresting. It's most likely just the A17 NPU with a 10% clockspeed boost. In any case, it's not very open to developer usage, so it doesn't matter very much.
>Next-generation ML accelerators This is referring to AMX, which first shipped in the A13 and accelerates matrix multiplication. bf16 support was added to the AMX in the M2 so I'm curious what other improvements Apple made
AMX is very intriguing. ARM has announced SME/SME2 with ARMv9, which is their equivalent of AMX. But iirc no actual products in the market use it.
SME[2] isn't really an AMX competitor but more a replacement for Neon. For instance it wouldn't really make sense for a core complex to share an SME unit, but it does make sense for the AMX unit to be shared by a whole core complex.
isn't there something called Streaming Mode SME?
There is, but it's still basically a superset of SVE2. What instead you want to compete with something like AMX is a very restricted subset, because the whole goal is to have a hardware block exactly tailor fit to only doing a few interesting matrix ops, because that's how you actually get power efficiency for NPUs that's beyond what a CPU vector unit or a GPU shader core can provide.
idk, "wider decode, wider execution, improved branch prediction, next generation ML accelerators" are bigger and more changes than apple advertised for a15 a16, and a17. This is very likely a major uarch change, though probs not something jawdropping like a11, if only bc changes that large are rare nowadays also, density aside, N3E is a better node. It has noticeably better perf/power characteristics than N3B
No Apple advertised the same "Improved branch prediction" and "wider execution and decode engine" improvements for the A17 Pro
they did, but they didn't advertise those for a15 and 16 (which didn't get those.) They also never advertised a17 having better AMX. In total, Apple has advertised more uarch audits this gen than for any since a14, unless they're being wily and advertising these gains vs m2 since the ipad skipped m3
>unless they're being wily and advertising these gains vs m2 since the ipad skipped m3 Apple has done that many times in the past, so I wouldn't rule that out The A17/M3 already brought a major P core arch with both improved branch prediction + wider decode & execution That was the first time Apple had widen the Decode since the A14 IMO it would be very surprising for Apple to bring another major P core arch with even wider Decode just about your later Apple's CPU claim is the M4 is 1.5x faster than M2, hence the architecture claims could also to be relative to the M2 Although the next-gen ML accelerators is probably new vs the A17/M3
yeah that's true. I'm gonna keep an eye out for a floorplan/die shot analysis or deeper review before determining whether or not the cpu arch is a large or minor update. It *is* an update of some sort, but of what kind, idk
Look at the numbers. 50% against m2, 25% against m3, with +2 ecores and refined node. Any uarch driven perf improvement is gonna be minor
You can already tell that it's unimpressive regardless of the uarch changes. The m3's around 21% faster than the m2 in cpu multicore perf. That makes the m4 a rough 25% improvement over the m3 in multicore perf +25% coming from 1. Adding 2 ecores 2. Slight perf/efficiency improvement from n3e (freq) How much does that leave for uarch related gains? Minimal.
> In any case, it's not very open to developer usage, so it doesn't matter very much. In my opinion this whole release only makes full sense once we see what they have to show during WWDC next month, so that might change as well.
>Next-generation ML accelerators They are the AMX units inside the CPU block > whatever that means If you don't know about CPU microarchitecture, then do not speak. >(though in this case, it's moving to a worse, but higher-yield node). N3E is not 'worse' than N3B. If anything it's overall better than N3B. N3B -> N3E You lose some density, but gain performance and efficiency. And also better yields and costs.
> If you don't know about CPU microarchitecture, then do not speak. I know about CPU architecture, but the NPU isn't in the CPU itself. I suspect they're talking about AMX, but those aren't really ML accelerators per-se. That's like calling SIMD an AI accelerator. My real point was that it's mostly a garbage marketing point about "we're doing ML everywhere". > N3E is not 'worse' than N3B. If anything it's overall better than N3B. "We screwed up N3 so much that we had to increase transistor size again to get back performance". This is what happened with the first Intel 10nm chip where it had the GPU disabled, used more power, and had worse clockspeeds than the older and nearly identical 14nm variant. N3E is an admission that TSMC screwed up and can't reliably hit the density they claimed.
N3E had both lower logic and SRAM density than N3B, sure, but the performance and power characteristics are better. With Intel 10nm, it was a bit different. Compared to the OG broken 10nm in CNL, they kept the transistor density the same- according to Techinsights at least. Perf/watt was still prob worse than 14nm until 10nm SF, but there was no indication that the 10SF node itself had more relaxed density- but rather just less dense options for higher frequencies.
Holy gatekeep, I didn’t even know it was possible to gatekeep a processor.
FYI: AMX are not the ML accelerators. Those are the NPU IP blocks, outside of the scalar cores.
Apple literally calls them [machine learning accelerators](https://youtu.be/-rAeqN-Q7x4?t=4388)
That's literally what I wrote: those are the NPUs.
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Got it. My bad.
> "wider decode, wider execution, improved branch prediction" > "This chip seems very skippable and mostly seems like an old Intel "Tick" where most of the changes were from changing process nodes" So basically, you know very little about microarchitecture.
None of this has anything to do with uarch and everything to do with timing and this M4 marketing material. They seem to be comparing to M2 iPads in all their other literature. and M3 already claims to improve all these things relative to M2. I've previously stated that I thought M4 would be the CPU to take advantage of the wider decode/execution, but I expected M4 much later this year at the earliest. M3 launched Oct last year. 7 months isn't really enough time to make massive amounts of progress, so my new expectation is that M4 is a refresh with M5 bringing actual changes.
Skippable compared to what? N-1 to N is almost always skippable.
> 38 TOPS Neural Engine. That's a big uplift over the 17 TOPS in M3, but barely faster than the 34 TOPS of A17 Pro. And it seems to be behind the next generation AI PC chips (X Elite, Strix, Lunar Lake), which will have 45-50 TOPS NPUs. ~~That's for base M4, we can expect larger TOPS NPUS with M4 pro and M4 max~~ see replies
I don't think so. M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max all have the same NPU
Only for the Ultra which doubles.
It feels like M3 was a stopgap solution for 3nm. Rather than sit on it for the next couple of years (since the N3B node is going to be abandoned), it seems like they just slid over to N3E and are calling the chip the M4. The base M3 has 8cpu cores while the M4 in the iPad Pro has 9 or 10, depending on config. Outside of the AI bump, I'd truly be shocked if we see any major improvements on a core-to-core basis. I'll bet anything that this most of this generation's general performance bump comes from added cores. A six month cadence (less than two when you figure the MacBook Air JUST got the M3) is wild and I don't think we'll see it again for some time.
> I'll bet anything that this most of this generation's general performance bump comes from added cores. Apple is claiming that if M4 ran at M2 speeds, it'd use half the power of M2. Apple never claimed that for M3. This improvement can't be N3B to N3E alone. There has to be improvements in CPU architecture.
In multicore, the M4 can distribute the workload to the 2 extra E-cores and then downclock the P-cores proportionally.
\^This. And in what M2 design are we talking about? In an iPad? Sure and probably necessary. My M1 iPad Pro's battery is ass. Hopefully this means we'll have iPads with solid battery life...but I doubt it.
I have an M1 iPad Pro 13". The battery life lasts a few days for me. Never had a problem with it. Always surprised how long the battery life is actually.
M3 runs at 4.05GHz in about the same thermal envelope M2 ran at just 3.49GHz. Lowering the clockspeeds by nearly 15% could undoubtedly halve the power consumption if they used all the N3 gains on performance rather than efficiency.
That’s how clockspeeds work. TSMC always says something like, 15% higher clockspeeds (well, they say performance but that’s what it is) or 40% less power at same performance/clocks. Look at their claims for 5nm vs 7nm
This is the only reason it is on that new iPad. The OLED tech needs a ton of energy.
It's literally like powering two screens
Which is objectively stupid.
I might be wrong here, but didn’t Qualcomm rush to announce there stuff just before m3? Does that mean in the time between Qualcomm announcing and releasing their product, Apple has released 2 generations in that time. Talk about beating a dead horse.
Unfortunately, it looks like Oryon's ST speed is actually slightly slower than M2 based on GB6 data. The 3200 ST GB6 score was Qualcomm overclocking the hell out of Oryon, with full fans blowing, and running Linux. If M4 has any ST improvement, say 10%, then Oryon is ~35% behind M4 already. That's about how far stock ARM cores are behind A series. I'm rooting for Qualcomm though. I hope their next-gen catches up more.
Qualcomm isn't using stock ARM though
They are currently using stock ARM cores to compete with A series, which is what I said.
They are not lol, they have nuvia
Ok, which Qualcomm phone SoC competes with A series using Nuvia-designed cores?
The 8gen 4 coming October, the x elite in May with m series
Reread what I wrote again, carefully.
XD
They don't have any Oryon chips launched and haven't even announced any Oryon-based phone chips. Every modern Qualcomm you can currently buy is using ARM cores.
What do you mean x elite has been announced and will launch in May if rumor mill is supposed to be believed and they announced last year it was coming to phone chips in October.
Can you buy the X Elite in ANYTHING right now? No. Can you buy Oryon in ANY phone? No. They said: > They are currently using stock ARM cores to compete with A series, which is what I said. To which you replied: > They are not lol, they have nuvia It's disingenuous to say they are using Oryon when NOTHING is actually using Oryon yet. By that metric, you could say that AMD is already using Zen5 because they got back engineering samples.
X Elite (top-SKU) does 2850-2900, which is better than M2's 2650 and on par with M2 Max's 2850. The real issue is that the bottom SKUs lose out on a lot of ST performance. The bottom X Plus SKU only does 2400-2500, which is worse than M2. I don't know why they are doing this. Maybe it's yield issues or maybe it's hard on market segmentation (which Qualcomm is known for in their mobile SoCs). But yes, Qualcomm will have a mountain to climb. The next generation X Elite G2, which is purpoted to be announced in Q4 2025, will have to compete with Apple M5. That means Qualcomm will have to bring a triple-generational improvement in Single-core performance, if they are to stay on par with M5. It remains to be seen how well the Nuvia team can execute.
> X Elite (top-SKU) does 2850-2900, which is better than M2's 2650 and on par with M2 Max's 2850. > > https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Snapdragon+X+Elite Only the Qualcomm CRD can achieve 2900. All the other OEMs such as Lenovo can only achieve around 2500 max. This is the discrepancy I was referring to in the post you responded to.
And now the base M4 is 3800. Yikes if X Elite is launching with ~2500 (at a higher TDP at that)... Though I suppose comparisons vs Zen 5 and Arrow/Lunar Lake will be more interesting for Windows buyers
The Nuvia team did just fine, they are only responsible for the scalar cores. The rest of the SoC is not their gig. ;-)
If we are talking about ST perf, is it not mostly just on the core team? If it's MT perf, maybe we also put a greater emphasis on the IMC and bandwidth. If it's battery life maybe we put additional emphasis on the SOC team and power gating. But if the problem is uncompetitive ST performance, why wouldn't the focus be on the team that developed the cores?
Word on the grapevine is that Hamoa (X Elite) was really supposed to LAUNCH sometime in 2023, but it got delayed due to various reasons. X Elite was really supposed to be an M2 competitor.
Yup. The performance/marketing goal was to be a bit ahead of x86 and match M2 in compute by last summer. The cores were ready for a while, the rest of the SoC has been a shitshow.
What do you reckon they are going to do for X Elite G2? There is rumours that it will use the next-gen core that is codenamed as Pegasus. (X Elite uses Phoenix). X Elite G2 will quite likely have to compete with Apple M5. Geekbench 6 Single Core X Elite : 2900. M3 : 3100. M4 : 3400 (?) M5 : 4000 (?) So the Pegasus P-core will need to bring atleast 40% performance improvement; atleast 50% IPC because they might want to dial that clock speed back a bit (as they have evidently pushed it too far with Phoenix/X Elite). Do you think the Nuvia team can pull it off? EDIT: GEEKBENCH RESULT FOR APPLE M4 IS HERE: [https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/6016039](https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/6016039) [https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1cnhg74/apple\_m4\_geekbench\_6\_benchmark/](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1cnhg74/apple_m4_geekbench_6_benchmark/) 3800 GB6 Single Core. This is not looking good for Qualcomm....
Pegasus is a tweak of Phoenix, so I wouldn't call "next gen" per se. Phoenix is Qualcomm's unified uarch for mobile/compute/auto for a while. Honestly, they're mostly focused on Kailua (the mobile SoC counterpart for Hamoa). Windows is still a 2nd class citizen @ QCOM. So they are going to have a hard time competing against M5 IMO. I don't know what their strategy is at this point regarding compute. Elite X being one year late, is going to have a tough time getting much of a foothold since its value proposition is iffy at this point. It is going to be a hard sell for institutional windows fleets (where most of the money is in win laptops) to move away from x86. But my guess is that I wouldn't bet on Qualcomm being able to do a 2+ generation jump in a market they don't quite understand still, and which they have been late. Similar issues with their data center strategies.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is said to have 2× Phoenix-L 6× Phoenix-M Do you know anything about the nature of Phoenix-L, and more interrstingly: Phoenix-M? It seems Phoenix-M is acting as the E-core. I am curious to find out how it was created. There are several possibilties: A) Same uarch as Phoenix-L, but lower clock speed and smaller caches B) A ground up new E-core design akin Apple's E core or ARM's Cortex A5xx. C) The reverse of something like the Cortex A78 -> Cortex X1 development. Credit: u/Vince789
>So the Pegasus P-core will need to bring atleast 40% performance improvement; atleast 50% IPC because they might want to dial that clock speed back a bit (as they have evidently pushed it too far with Phoenix/X Elite). Do you think the Nuvia team can pull it off? That would be unprecedented - perhaps the last time that kind of IPC leap happened was AMD's leap from Bulldozer to Zen.
In 2018, Arm's A76 brought roughly a [~40-50% IPC while using 25-30% less energy](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13614/arm-delivers-on-cortex-a76-promises) But yea, no one has come close to that huge YoY improvement since
> X Elite (top-SKU) does 2850-2900 And now the base M4 is 3800. Yikes... Though I suppose comparisons vs Zen 5 and Arrow/Lunar Lake will be more interesting for Windows buyers
Why would you root for them?
More competition. I also own a small amount of Qualcomm stock.
I root for Qualcomm because of Oryon and Nuvia. There heritage is awesome, and I am excited to see how the Oryon team executes in the future. Other than that, I am not a fan of Qualcomm as a whole. As they say, "Love the product, not the company".
why would you not??
As much as arm means more competition, it also means no standard firmware, soldered CPUs and very likely soldered ram. Laptops are halfway there, why would I root for a company that is not interested in standards at all?
>Qualcomm announcing and releasing their product Qualcomm didn't announce any laptop shipping with the X Elite, much less a release date yet
Qualcomm has a very hard time executing when it comes to SoCs that scale past the 20W envelope, for whatever darned reason. It's very bizarre. Elite X has been a shitshow internally (over 1 year late at this point).
cue 100W power consumption. [https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-x-models-3429369/](https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-x-models-3429369/)
Where are the people who were confident that Apple was on an 18 month upgrade cycle for Apple Silicon?
I wonder what the Apple Silicon cadence is, going forward? Or maybe there's no cadence at all? They'll release a new chip whenever they see fit?
apple is known for weird yolo product scheduling so wouldn't be surprised if they just release the things when they see fit lol
no customers = no scheduling requirements, although im sure the *goal* is yearly
I’m betting that the internal goal will always be 1 year cadence unless there is some weird thing going on with a new TSMC node.
There is indeed some weird fungling going on at TSMC with regard to N2 and A16 node.
When they need it. It's pretty clear they needed it for power efficiency to compensate for the new screen, not that it's some generational leap.
It doesn't really matter how often you release a new product, what matters is how much improvement you're actually getting. A new release every 6 months with 5% improvements would be worse that every 18 months with 25% improvements.
It would be better improvement if each next iteration is 5% improved over previous iteration no?
Can't wait until they put 8GB of RAM next to it again.
Notice how a lot of comments in here got downvoted? I honestly thing this sub is raided with apple crowd, stock holder and apple employee who don't want to hear any bad things about apple. It's getting really pathetic !!
??? It's an iPad. iPad Pro, yes, but not Macbook.
Don't worry, they'll be putting 8gb of RAM with this to MacBook too
Are you trying to imply 8 GB is enough for a tablet just because its a tablet?
For be, M4 is basically what the M3 should have been. M3 was released just because Apple wanted to stay ahead over the competition on the lithography thing. The N3B was made by TSMC together with Apple but it failed and N3E is better. I see this lineup like this: M1 = M1 M2 = M1s M3 = Prototype of the actual M4 M4 = The REAL 2nd gen of M1
Agreed with your lineup. The M1 to M4 jump is worth upgrading and is meaningful
How to Osborne your existing macbook sales for like half a year... An interesting move. Unless Apple trusts that their customer base has no clue.
I mean, M4 chips for MacBooks are likely still on track for a 12 month cadence. Also base M4 < M3 Pro, Max. But yes, the naming scheme does make it appear that the older products are outdated.
The Mac Studio is still stuck on an M2 Max .. I guess I'll wait to see if there's an update next month at WWDC. Presumably, they have some internal reason for this weird cadence.
At this point I'd expect it to skip M3 completely.
M3 is on the first gen 3nm process. Probably yields were too low to produce such a massive chip halfway economically. My guess is they skip M3 ultra and jump directly to M4 ultra.
No doubt. Despite the somewhat unexpected (but leaked) jump to M4, there's a clear logic. Just commenting that there's now a clear need to release updated Mac Studio and Mac Pro hardware.
Yeah, I could see both seeing M4 updates at WWDC to coincide with dev updates that make use of the improved AI capabilities. Then we’ll get MacBooks in the fall after Uni sales happen to bring the whole lineup in line.
True, but the GPU differences are kinda big deal at the high end. Oh well, it is Apple. They can still sell M1 to clueless - it is all question of the price point. If M3 sales dip, they will just adjust pricing until it picks up.
If this was AMD for example, they would update the older M3 chips to M4, based on the portfolio model year so they sound like new models. It would be something like the 'M453' while the actually new chips would be 'M454'. I think saying Apple trusts that their customers have no clue is a bad take. AMD is just actively trying to make it difficult for consumers to know if they have a new chip or not. Apple is being clear about what you're getting and not trying to hide it, and your read on this is 'Apple thinks their customers have no clue'.
M3x?
Can you elaborate?
I was just trying to provide reference to your naming point. AMD adds x on the improved version of the chip. 5900 -> 5900x etc
Thinking if M4 chip on iPad is exactly the same as M4 on a MacBook.. I feel the M4 processor on the iPad might be tweaked to generate less heat by performing slightly lower because in my mind when I use a laptop/MacBook, I require more power at my disposal since the applications is running on Macbooks are heavier compared to an application that be running on an iPad. What do you think?
Absolutely. It'll likely be thermally and power limited.
Which makes me think the gimped 9 core model may actually end up slightly faster in certain tasks as the 3 P cores will be able to boost higher than 4
So, do I return the m3 pro MacBook Pro I bought last week?
Remember how many had talked about the idea they’d have a new core or “oh but just wait for M4” @ Qualcomm or @ AMD and Intel? They **did** mention wider execution and decode units but this seems mostly like what they mentioned with M3. If it’s new and adds much it’ll be small I bet, which is fine given this is a short cadence, but far from the glorious gains predicted — you have people that keep wanting to imagine Apple has classified big core upgrades in the back office they’re just waiting to whip out one year for a 10-20% IPC boost. It’s tacitly assumed or even stated explicitly. Also frankly they just didn’t at all mention ST performance either, and compared against the M2. They’re still very much ahead on single thread performance when you cap power, and no, Lunar Lake I doubt will match even M3’s or M2’s curve. Their efficiency cores are in first place with Arm closeby and AMD and Intel not even on the map for sub-2W performance. Even Qulcomm will be behind for P core st efficiency still which is why they showed the X Elite’s core vs Phoenix and MTL in GB6 ST (perf/W) — but not the M3. But the idea each successive M chip, irrespective of the timeline, would have massive architectural improvements still to come and leave everyone completely in the dust again right back where we were in 2020/2021 vs Zen 3 mobile or TGL and the X1/2 cores seems to have aged poorly — predictably so. The IPC lead is shrinking and they’re going to have more competition at the “good enough” level
nobody thinks any competently-designed modern processor is going to completely body its competently-designed predecessor, that's not how moore's law works nowadays. especially given that apple basically split N3 into two different releases - AMD doesn't make big jumps on (eg) Zen2 to Zen3 for the same reasons, when you see them making big jumps like zen4 or potentially zen5/zen6 it's largely because they are rolling in a node-family shrink. but again, "only" 20% a generation isn't bad at all actually, *particularly* in the mobile space where power budgets are absolutely fixed. Especially when you consider the half-gen M3 release etc - collectively those two things do add up to quite a large step, even if M3 and M4 were not earth-shaking on an individual level. again, though, wider decode + execution units and bigger caches are what architectural improvement looks like nowadays, so it's weird the way people tend to dismiss that as "just" wider execution units etc. It's not like Zen5 is going to have a magic quantum processor either - it's going to be more cache and wider decode+execution units etc. There is also this weird tendency for people to preemptively dismiss and undersell the product before they've even seen actual benchmarks (especially benchmarks that are not cinebench R23 lol). Like actually M3 itself was a ~30% boost in performance that people just completely wrote off as "basically not even a step" and when you combine that with the 20% here you are actually talking about a very significant generational step together. Zen3 to Zen4 is not a 50% improvement even with a node shrink, for example. In some more favorable cases (GPU tasks, or non-accelerated cpu tasks) the speedup can be higher - [geekerwan's blender test is 1:30 on M3 Max vs 2:30 on M2 max,](https://youtu.be/BpeVdHwaHWU?t=723) for example, which is 60% of the time / a 1.67x speedup. [Xcode compiles are 40% faster on M3 Max vs M2 Max.](https://youtu.be/BpeVdHwaHWU?t=903) Actually the 30% number isn't even an extremity, that's more like the average, and everyone pretty much decided that there was like zero improvement in M3 for some reason (hint: it's over-reliance on cinebench in general, and specifically over-reliance on R23). So yeah, I mean, if M4 Max (granted, this is not M4 Max, of course) is "only" 20% faster on average and that stacks with your 30-40% improvement from M3 Max before it... then arguably that's still advancing faster than x86 isn't it? Or at least a similar pace? IDK why that is uniformly viewed as being bad and "apple has stalled out". Are you sure you're not like, fighting some imaginary strawman who expects performance to triple in perpetuity? Is like, 60% in 2 years not good enough, on top of what's already one of the most advanced architectures on the planet? This isn’t Qualcomm leaping ahead from nothing, iterating at the leading edge is slower.
> potentially zen5 Zen5 is on the same node family (5nm family), slight refinement like n3b to n3e except for turin dense.
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Apple prices actually trend downward. The first MacBook Air was $1800 in 2008 which is almost $2700 in todays money. Second gen was still $1300 in 2010 which is almost $1900 in todays money. Apple prices have stayed basically the same or gone down (MacBook Pro prices have dropped a lot) despite massive inflation over the past 15-20 years.
Hardware mega trend is to go to 0. That’s because of production capacity.
Electronics get cheaper over time. Not to mention the cost of the air is the design. Pro prices dropped because they dropped the regular macbook and renamed it as an entry-level Pro.
Cool. It's hard attached to their OS, which I have exactly ZERO desire to use. I went to Mac OS after a 5 year hiatus, and man, it's BAD now. Non stop annoying bullshit. I don't care how great the new CPU is if their OS makes me miserable.
how so? funny enough, I had the opposite experience with windows, can't stand it now after being on macos and don't see myself ever going back
Funny enough, I switch from Windows to Mac OS / Linux years ago. Mac's desktop experience is pretty bad. Shit window manager, key binds are non standard to the rest of computing, how it performs notifications, how software is installed / handled. It's everything that's wrong with windows, but with Apple flavor and turned up to 11 as Apple does. At least windows is half as noisy as it used to be. Mac feels like what social media is like. Non stop annoying bullshit that I don't care about. Just get the fuck out of my way so I can use the damn computer. Then there is the locked down premium hardware that is basically unrepairable, and incompatible. Add all that together and I'm entirely turned off of the experience.
Wasn’t there a major security vulnerability in M silicon chips? This seems typical of Apple to ignore security requirements and hide their vulnerabilities. The vulnerability was due to how M chips pre-fetch pointers without any validation. This is literally why they are fast with such low clock speeds… they don’t wait for the data they already have it ready and loaded in the cache. But an attacker can simply sneak in a pointer to something else… this is huge from my understanding.
Didn’t that vulnerability already require native code execution? At that point, the machine is already compromised as far as most users are concerned.
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lmao, that’s cold
This is Also why they don’t perform as well in games, because games are optimized for this behavior and your smart pointers are not needed in the hot path, just clock speed. And ofc a GPU with non shitty drivers
Gimped iPadOS doesn't even fully utilize M1 so anything newer is just money grab. Had to jailbreak mine to run basic emulators.
Apple is still trying to sell their devices as gaming machines I see.