Apple announced the new Apple M4 Pro chip this morning alongside the newly revamped Apple Mac mini (2024), bringing Apple Intelligence to one of the most popular mini-PCs on the market.
The new Apple M4 Pro follows yesterday’s announcement of the new Apple iMac (2024) with an Apple M4 chip, the first Mac desktop to get the upgraded silicon.
With the release of the new Apple M4 Pro, we’re all anticipating new MacBook Pro models at some point—possibly as early as this week.
So what does the M4 Pro have to offer?
While we currently only know about the new M4 Pro chip’s performance in the redesigned Mac mini (and therefore can’t comment directly on how well it runs in the upcoming M4 MacBook Pro models), we do have some specs and some performance comparisons to look at here.
Apple describes the M4 Pro as having ‘the world’s fastest CPU core’ for single-threaded performance, as well as significantly boosted multithreaded performance over the M3 Pro. The CPU has 14 cores in total – ten performance cores and four efficiency cores – while the on-chip integrated GPU has up to 20 cores.
The M4 Pro’s configurable GPU is up to twice as powerful as the GPU found in the base M4 chip, and both chips now deliver hardware-accelerated ray-tracing capabilities – a first for the Mac mini the chip will be launching in.
Neural Engine performance also receives a huge boost across both chips, with double the speed of the previous-gen M3 NPU and triple the speed of the M1 NPU in AI workloads. This is a vital aspect of the M4 and M4 Pro, since Apple’s new Mac products will feature Apple Intelligence, Apple’s own foray into the world of generative AI tools.
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Additionally, the M4 Pro will support up to 64GB of unified RAM, with the fastest memory bandwidth of any AI PC processor on the market right now: a staggeringly speedy 273GB/s for accelerating local AI workloads. Finally, M4 Pro will support Thunderbolt 5 connectivity through USB-C ports, another first for Apple hardware.
