Love that we live in a world where '28 billion transistors' is a throw-away line! Lets take a moment to admire that: three transistors for each person on the planet in an area smaller than a postage stamp. Mind, boggled!

Well done video. I’ve owned almost every model of iPad and have a household of M-series latptop/desktop machines. The M4 iPad that I picked 5 days ago now has wildly changed my workflow. Doing very high resolution wildlife photography (and some videography), speed is 100% the most important variable in whatever equipment I use, besides the display. I’m now spending more time working on my M4 iPad than I am on my Mac Studio or 16” MacBook Pro. It’s performance running Lightroom, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Affinity Photo 2 and Final Cut Pro is absolutely amazing. Now, I shoot, I hookup my Thunderbolt CFExpress card reader, dump hundreds of 50MP Sony .ARW images, and get down to processing my photos (and some 8K/30 and 4K/120 video) all without touching my desktop machines. My Mac Studio M1 Ultra 128GB is faster when doing huge batches of very intensive image processing, but that really just comes down to having more than double the CPU and GPU cores in addition to still very strong NPU performance even though that machine is several generations behind. Anyhow, it’s amazing. I care very little about benchmarks because the only thing I care about are the results I can accomplish and how effectively I can get that work done. There are still VERY strong use cases for each of my machines in different scenarios. I won’t be one of those people ignorantly stating that it’s can do everything. It can’t. Neither can my MacBook Pro or Mac Studio, they all work together excelling in their own ways. Also, being a gamer, I love playing more and more games on my iPad including FINALLY being able to load up my retro games via Delta Emulator. If all you care about is AAA gaming, go buy a Windows PC or Steam Deck. If you troll KZfaq, Twitch, and barely use any real capabilities of any of your machines, buy whatever you want and still pretend to be an expert online to make yourself feel good. What it really comes down to is buy the technology that lets you be creative, productive, or have fun in the manner that is best suited to your budget and personal preferences! 😊 I use all major operating systems daily (yes that includes Linux), and all manner of hardware (yes, that even includes an Android device and Windows on ARM). I have stuff I love and hate personally…but at the end of the day it is ALL pretty darn amazing technology and it’s a good time to be alive if you enjoy this sort of thing. 👍

Excellent video, great idea to not just repeat the press kit and come with some additional information 😊 I liked the idea to divide by the GHz to understand the change better

Thanks Gary for this information and clarification video on the new M4. Have a great day!

i was wondering when they’d switch to armv9. i always thought it was a bit unfortunate that the early M chips were stuck on the older ISA with the less robust vector support. glad to see they’re still trying to compete and not just sitting back.

This is why I subscribe this channel and even put on the bell. Gary goes deeper than the usual KZfaq tech reviewer and I really want to know these details in computer tech!

Thanks for this Gary!

This is an incredible synopsis of M4. I will spread the URL to your video.

you received a new sub by the 4 min mark of the video. thanks.

Great video!! Very interesting information

Nice Overview. Thanks!

Thanks for this.

The dynamic caching has nothing at all to do with system memory. What it is talking about is the on die local cache (within the GPU) (think of it like L1/2 cache but for the GPU) and how this is divided into Cache, thread group memory and registers. On (all other) gpus when you run a task the GPU will look at the maximum amount of local memory and registers that tasks will need throughout the runtime of the task (this includes optional branches that it might never take but could... you cant know before you run it after all). It will then look at how any registers and local mem each core has and from that figure out how many copies of that shader it can run at once. However most real world shaders have very non uniform mem/regsiter usage were 95% of the shader time will only use a tiny fraction but that 5% will use a huge amount. What this means in practise is the GPU is still limited on how many copies it can run but 95% of the time there is other capacity that it could use but it cant do anything about that since the registers and or local memory are resolved for that high demand point (that might not even happen in each instance of the shader as it likly is behind some optional branch). Dynamic caching has 2 key changes to this: 1) the gpu at runtime can dyanmicly change the local per core (l1) memory to re-alocate how much is used for registers, thread group memory or cache. Rather than on other gpus were the GPU vendor needed to in advance fix this ratio. This is a big deal as differnt tasks have differnt demands on the ratio so now they can make better use across more use cases. 2) Due to being able to dyanmicly alocate more registers or local memory during runtime the gpu can run more instances of a task at once since if it hits that high mem/register demanding point it can get some more registers (or thread group memory) by kicking something out of cache... These 2 things combined has a HUGE impact on performance for branching code pathways were your you cant predict before running it what pathways the code will take so on other GPUs the GPU must anticipate the worst case scenario leaving lots of GPU un-der used due to some optional pathways that maybe non of the threads end up hitting. The biggest culprit of this is RT like operations were your sending a load of rays out to intersect objects it he scene and then you need to do shuddering computation for each interaction but there are lots of differnt types of objects out there leading to very few threads being run once just in case all the rays end up hitting the most costly (from a thread group mem or register) martial function. But the key takeaway is it has nothing at all to do with your system memory it is all about the tiny amount of local memory (registers, thread group and cache) that is within each GPU core.

How much do you think Qualcomm is leaving on the table in terms of performance for not being able to implement ARMv9 instruction set in their Elite professors? I am guessing that must've been part of the bump in Apple numbers along with Ghz, improved process node and all that you mentioned.

Good analysis

People keep getting distracted by the iPad when the big story here is the impact the M4 / Pro / Max / Ultra will have on Macs.

It is V9?! Hell yeah! So my new device isnt a total waste of money ;) Joking aside, I'm mostly curious on the powerdraw in pure watts

Thank you for your benchmarks and analysis. Out of curiosity, were all benchmarks run with the new Geekbench 6.3? There were some methodology changes in 6.1 and then SME support in 6.3.

Love the fact that Apple now focus on native port of AAA console games on their machine.

Interesting take.

Great video, super excited for when we know more about the Snapdragon chips! Hoping for great Linux support for them

Apple in an ARMs race (pun intended) with itself 😂 Thanks professor!

we need to wait for the power usage and temperature of the qualcomm chips

The upgrade to ARM 9.4 instructions is encouraging.

It's impressive that yes, in numbers the Qualcomm Elite-X should be faster than the M4, but there are no single device with it, even half a year after it was announced, yet the M4 is already here and it was just a few days after, ON AN IPAD. If they take more time there will be a desktop M4 with a lot more performance cores and the Elite-X won't be as disruptive as they thought it was going to be, only in the PC-area, not as the competition for Apple silicon

8:34 and further shows how increased clock speed rocks all the boats in the port (not just CPU cores)... Apple same as others who design their own processors understand already how hard is to truly improve processor speed just from the microarchitecture point of view and how much easier is to just increase clocks. Processor architecture improvements r hard and expensive and soon or later limits r reached resulting in the single digit % increases. That's why memory system/subsystems and interface with interconnects will play another significant role in the future besides everything else. Memory in comparison to the computing has been left way too far behind for decades and now it has to catch up... Excellent quick analysis vid, thx Gary!

Higher clock and adapting the micro-architecture for that is nice, but I read that the M2 and M3 throttled easily. Got to see how the M4 does under loads, if throttles too, its not really much progress for many uses.

I have been wondering when Apple would move to V9. Now I need a refresher video on what V9 brings. My only recolection is that it should need less code optimization for high performance.

Great video Gary, this type of video is why I initially subscribed, not the Chat GPT scripted ones😊, great work!

Great video, once again with the best technical nuances that would escape drooling buyers with cash in hand. Indeed, choosing its mobile platform to introduce the latest M chip is an indicator of its marketing strategy. Windows is closing the gap with its creator and artist suites, we're back to hardware vs software competition.

Do any of these changes impact the security concerns that were identified in the M1-M3 chips?

I didn’t know it was a v9 arch chip. Nice thanks Gary… awesome stuff

Is M4 the first Armv9 SoC from Apple? I thought Apple switch to Armv9 with the A17 Pro and M3 series.

Apple should start with 12GB RAM minimum. Since they already have 6GB RAM chips in the Macbooks

The OS runs on the efficiency cores almost all the time. The performance cores are used when needed. So the difference of 3 performance to 4 performance cores will only matter to people who are running it full tilt a lot.

As I always say, for consumers the single core performance is the best metric for a computer's snappiness - most consumers who have a ton of cores just spend their time with most cores idle. If you're a creative or graphics designer or do a lot of transcoding, you probably use software which is multi-threaded in which case you can make use of that multi-core performance. Really though for most folks, something like Speedometer 3.0 is probably the best benchmark you can use to compare computer performance.

For most of us, M4 is like a 2000mph car, but we live in a 60mph world. Hard to tell M1 from M4 in everyday use. The KZfaq content generators won't be happy until they can render a 30 minute 8k video file in 10 seconds.

I wonder if the M4 has fixed the GoFetch vulnerability?

Now that the efficiency cores are so great, I think Apple should make an efficiency core only processor as well, with focus on power efficiency and maximum battery life. They should experiment with how low they can go without sacrificing the user experience. I think Apple could make a phone with at least double the battery life, maybe more.

does it still only have USB2 speed on the lighting/USB-C socket or is that now thunderbolt 4 rated?

At some point can you do a deep dive into the new Snapdragon vs M4?

Good analysis. Interesting that Snapdragon has pulled ahead, but it doesn't look like that'll hold for too long when the Pro and Max versions come out. The question is what Qualcomm's response to that will be. Either way, I'm really glad to see the PC market finally making a serious push for ARM.

i have seen many reviews and yours is the only one mentioning Armv9.

I was waiting for Apple to get to newer designs. While I don't blame Apple for it as ARM Inc is spitting them out so fast. It is nice to see newer stuff outside of the realm of smartphones. I was disappointed to learn that the M3 was still not upgraded to v9. Good video! Hopefully, we'll get an inexpensive Mac Mini with M4. 😉

P-core CPU area in the M3 SOC increased substantially over M2 implying a significant redesign. Now M4 takes it to another level with V9 ISA for MB Pro targeted SOCs only one year after M3 assuming M4 MB Pros are released in the October / November time frame. Apple is really executing in regard to the SOC design. So much for future proofing talk with regard to M3...

I thought that it was widely discussed that the Snapdragon X Elite would consume "up to 80W"? Do we know yet what the maximum TDP of the M4 is?

Are the performance and efficiency cores what ARM used to call big.LITTLE architecture or something completely different?

Do they update the x86 profiles like they do the ARM profiles (v8 to v9)?

@7:24 The Geekbench 6 score graph is very misleading. M4 10-core MT is less than 15000 (unless you use liquid nitrogen to prevent throttling). I think what you've done in the graph is added the MT score on top of the ST score, which pushed the blue MT bar to around 18000.

Hi Gary/viewers, it’s usually been wisdom that CPU cores come in twos. In fact I’ve found shoddy performance when using odd cores in Parallels. What is is about iPhones/iPads that it’s normal to have odd numbers vs. say windows?

I seems like the tshirt link is broken: "Uh oh... We couldn't find the page you're looking for. ..."

M4 Ultra is going to be a killer! 💀👾🤯

@07.50 : For those wondering... here is what Geekbench reports for iPad16,6 * ARM 4408 MHz (10 cores) - Single-Core Score: 4004 - Multi-Core Score: 14,943

Bro, where is the speed test g videos? Why did u stop ?

Any clues on what an M4 ultra or extreme might be like, based on the architecture of the standard M4? Hoping we soon see a 96 core GPU with 1028GB unified memory option 🤞 maybe a desktop only variety of SoC or something

Deeper doesn't necessarily mean the pipeline. It can also mean the reorder buffer size. The pipeline length is the minimum clocks from fetch to retire. All modern uarch cores are doing their best to keep this number small, ie in the 9-13 clocks range. But with the ROB they can execute instructions out of order, holding some back for over 200 clocks to hide consecutive load hazards. Efficiency cores hide small caches and shorter reorder buffers by clocking lower. It's easier to feed the beast when the beast chews more slowly. They're almost certainly not increasing the pipeline length of the efficiency cores to boost clocks. ie I would gladly take 100:1 bets against that.

Except that they are expensive as hell.Does anybody even need that much power to watch this video?

Excellent Video!!, one question regarding CPU arch.. does Apple or GCC provides a compiler for Armv9.4-A , to developer communities ?

cpu is only a single threaded gpu. ie one slice of gpu core. why try to accelerate poor sequential code. instead make the compiler produce parallelizable and nicely fast linear code. yep make the compiler do away completely the need for pipelining. pre-sorted code. yep, more like gpu style code, instead of the normal cpu style code.

Is Apple the only manufacturer that uses A.R.M. in their CPUs, or are there others that produce desktops using the same architecture?

What is the difference between a "performance" core and an "efficiency" core? Counting them seems to figure a lot in the discussion.

How does the new Apple CPU compare to the equivalent in Intel?

My predictions are that 6 efficiency cores is where they want to be in terms of the E-core count now, and as the M3 Pro (and only the M3 Pro variant in the M3 chip family) already managed to sneak in 2 extra E-cores, the core count of the non-binned M4 Pro will stay unchanged at 6+6. The M4 Max might make the jump from 12+4 to 12+6, which will make the M4 Pro and Max certainly not as big of a jump as the baseline M4 in terms of the multithreaded performance increase, but it will still be a decent upgrade in the CPU with the higher IPC P and E-cores. As for the A18 Pro, I think that will continue to have 2 P-cores but will make the jump to 6 E-cores. M4 Pro: 12-core, 6+6, M4 Max: 18-core, 12+6 M4 Ultra: 36-core, 24+12 A18 Pro: 8-core, 2+6

Unsure why the iPad needs all this horsepower, but it is interesting. Love the summary. Thank you.

But does it have a calculator app and can you watch two videos at the same time?

This passively cooled tablet chip nearly matches the performance of my Intel Core i7-14700 desktop CPU that draws up to 235W at peak power. My best Geekbench6 multi thread score is 19,300

What’s the difference between an “efficiency core” and a “performance core”?

snapdragon will use 2x the power, I mean they've said so... its still not even in the same realm .

So it will show my KZfaq videos faster? Do I need to worry about it playing at 2x speed?

I’m hoping GoFetch has been fixed with the new M4s.

a18 pro will have 2+6

Finally some changed from the original A14 architecture. It really looks to be a massive upgrade. This is most likely the most powerful core in the world for a consumer device. It would be hilarious if the iPhone has more powerful single-core performance than the i9 14900k. The improvement is so big that M4 is now as poweful as M2 Max. People are still sticking to the M1 Max MacBooks and now Apple offers greater performance in the lowest-end of desktop chips. This would certaily open a lot of doors, especially for gaming as that M4 GPU is extremely powerful. We are now in an area where every mobile game can run smoothly between 100-120fps. M2 was not capable of that, mostly because of the 4x resolution difference compared to smartphones.

256GB is limited to 1080p in ProRes videorecording, if someone would like to film with this device

If the ML accelerator does Matrix multiplication, then what does the NPU do?

Will wait for real world benchmarks, GB6 was updated to support SME just before the M4 was released... It's the last benchmark to take seriously for figuring out the real IPC improvements.

The A17 Pro still wasn't v9 for a late 2023 chip? 🤔

Definitely a step up, but I'm not convinced sacrificing a P-core for two E-cores is a good trade with the 9-core models. I live in hope that one day Apple will stop being so stingy with RAM, but I'm preparing for disappointment.

Now my YT videos are going to look amazing.

Lol, There was a time when apple would just draw grph with no scale or just say fastest Ipad ever. Now it even specifies the branch prediction improvement like AMD does for Ryzen.

make video no snapdragon Elite X too

I would imagine, that the M4 is 1.5 times as fast as the M2, but not „1.5 times“ faster, because then it would be 250% as fast as the M2.

8:15 contradicts 10:18

snapdragon, even based on vendors claims, only wins multicore by having more cores. On that basis it seems unlikely to be winning on performance per watt.

Watching this video using my new 512 mb 11 inch M4 😅

38 Trillion ops/sec on that neural engine doesn't meet Microsoft's minimum requirements to run Copilot on Windows. I wonder how that will work when people use Windows on parallels on the coming Macs.

I think we forget that the X Elite and X Plus are on the 4nm node. Hence the Apple CPUs have a higher transistor density and so could have way more room to create wider execution units and clock them higher with a lower penalty on efficiency. So it's not an apples to apples comparison when you talk about the 9 core M4 Vs the 10 core X Plus.

finally some IPC gains. X elite is still using 4nm, same as M2, so I will forgive it

The snapdragon X plus and Elite are afaik activly cooled They will have to be compared with the M4 pro and M4 max

This is just the base m4 imagine what an m4 pro or max will do in a MacBook.

Dont buy any arm based laptop until they use arm9!! Wait!

No A18 pro will get 2+6 and A18 will have last gen A17 cores with enhanced Npu 3+5 is too much for a phone it will overheat like anything even by putting graphite cooling .

In practice 10 core version isn't that much better than the 9 core version even in productivity applications, definitely not worth the cost increase imho

amx like Instructions in apple silicon sounds weird

It will be interesting to see how this compares to Arrow Lake and Zen 5. I'd say it would also be interesting to see how it compares to the Microsoft whatever with the new Snapdragon Elite X chip, but it's Microsoft and I ain't buying it because I REALLY dislike the company so I'm not interested one BIT in that comparison.

It gets harder to justify buying a Mac for an elderly person who just wants to access the Internet. Thank God for Chromebooks.

If they come w 64 core, 256G ram, 16T, add addition standalone gpu 128G, my kids can use it till they retired. -real sustainability

APPLe with their CPU advantage with Nvidias AI GPU,s could create a revolutionary chip, if both were combined.

those rascals, hiding the tech specs in the tech spec section...the gall!

Sorry I call BS that Apple uses the Arm scalable extension 2. Apple had its own implementation for matrix operations known as the AMX matrix units which have been part of the M series since the beginning. It’s probably a new implementation of these units which have nothing to do with SME2.

It's obvious the Snapdragon will not be power efficient. Apple will have a clear advantage in that area.