Apple unveiled a new chip in iPad Pro devices, in the latest Let Loose event. Interestingly, the M4 chip has a powerful Neural Engine, capable of 38 trillion operations per second, making it vastly superior for AI tasks and enhancing features like Live Captions and Visual Look Up on the iPad Pro.
Additionally, the M4 chip features a powerful Neural Engine,- a remarkable 60x improvement over the first Neural Engine in the A
11 Bionic chip. Moreover, the M4 chip’s combination of advanced ML accelerators, a high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth memory makes it exceptionally powerful for AI tasks.
“The new iPad Pro with M4 is a great example of how building best-in-class custom silicon enables breakthrough products,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies.
In addition to the upgrades on iPad pro and iPad Air, Apple also introduced a new Apple Pencil Pro and Magic Keyboard for the devices
Last year, Apple treated AI developers with M3 chips, which lets them work with large transformer models with billions of parameters on the MacBook, seamlessly.
M3 prominently features GPUs with “Dynamic Caching,” unlike traditional GPUs, making it useful for game developers and users of graphics-intensive apps like Photoshop or photo-related AI tools.
A user said in Hacker news, “If (and that’s a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips it’s a strategy that, I personally really really welcome as I don’t want the AI future to be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud providers.”
If Apple keeps the M4 chip’s APIs open, it would be beneficial for developers as it would allow them to run a variety of AI workloads on the chip, rather than being dependent on a few cloud providers.
However, with improved AI capabilities, faster performance and efficiency, and media capabilities will significantly benefit developers in creating more advanced, powerful, and visually stunning applications.
