Apple M4 Pro and M4 Max
Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors):
All three chips are built using industry-leading, second-generation 3-nanometer technology, which improves performance and power efficiency. The CPUs across the M4 family feature the world’s fastest CPU core, delivering the industry’s best single-threaded performance, and dramatically faster multithreaded performance. The GPUs build on the breakthrough graphics architecture introduced in the previous generation, with faster cores and a 2x faster ray-tracing engine. M4 Pro and M4 Max enable Thunderbolt 5 for the Mac for the first time, and unified memory bandwidth is greatly increased — up to 75 percent. Combined with a Neural Engine that’s up to 2x faster than the previous generation and enhanced machine learning (ML) accelerators in the CPUs, the M4 family of chips brings incredible performance for pro and AI workloads.
[…]
M4 Pro features an up to 14-core CPU consisting of up to 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores. It’s up to 1.9x faster than the CPU of M1 Pro, and up to 2.1x faster than the latest AI PC chip. The GPU features up to 20 cores for graphics performance that is 2x that of M4, and up to 2.4x faster than the latest AI PC chip. […] M4 Pro supports up to 64GB of fast unified memory and 273GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is a massive 75 percent increase over M3 Pro and 2x the bandwidth of any AI PC chip.
[…]
M4 Max is the ultimate choice for data scientists, 3D artists, and composers who push pro workflows to the limit. It has an up to 16-core CPU, with up to 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores. It’s up to 2.2x faster than the CPU in M1 Max and up to 2.5x faster than the latest AI PC chip. The GPU has up to 40 cores for performance that is up to 1.9x faster than M1 Max and up to an astounding 4x faster than the latest AI PC chip. […] M4 Max supports up to 128GB of fast unified memory and up to 546GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is 4x the bandwidth of the latest AI PC chip.
The RAM ceiling for the Pro chip has increased from 36 GB to 64 GB, but for the Max it’s unchanged at 128 GB.
Here’s a summary of the cores situation:
| Regular | Pro | Max | |
|---|---|---|---|
| M1 | 4p/4e | 8p/2e | 8p/2e |
| M2 | 4p/4e | 8p/4e | 8p/4e |
| M3 | 4p/4e | 6p/6e | 12p/4e |
| M4 | 4p/6e | 10p/4e | 12p/4e |
So this seems like a bit of a return to form, where the Pro is closer to the Max, and the Max is mostly attractive for GPU performance and RAM capacity, rather than the CPU. (And you need a $900 BTO option to get those extra 2 cores on the M4 Max.)
Previously:
