Apple’s May 7 event has wrapped, and with it comes several new announcements that iOS users will be able to spend their money on, including a new Apple Pencil Pro, iPad Air, and iPad Pro, an updated version of the device that is being described as Apple’s thinnest product yet, featuring a state-of-the-art Ultra Retina XDR display that leverages not one, but two OLED panels. Available as an expansive 13-inch model or a super-portable 11-inch model, the new iPad Pro is powered by the M4 chip, a new 3-nanometer SoC that delivers “phenomenal performance” and hardware-accelerated ray tracing with the help of its 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU.
Apple’s product announcements include:
- iPad Pro (releases May 15, starting at $999)
- “It’s the thinnest Apple product yet — and more powerful than ever. Incredibly portable in a stunning new design. Ultra Retina XDR, the world’s most advanced display. Outrageous performance and game-changing graphics with the Apple M4 chip. And all-day battery life.”
- iPad Air (releases May 15, starting at $599)
- “Now available in an 11-inch and all-new 13-inch model with stunning Liquid Retina display. Supercharged performance with the Apple M2 chip. New landscape front camera and all-day battery life.”
- Apple Pencil Pro (releases May 15 for $129)
- “Engineered for limitless creativity to bring ideas to life like never before. Intuitive and precise control with advanced features like squeeze, barrel roll, and haptic feedback. And now with Find My for easy location in the Find My app.”
Promo vids:
Apple on the M4’s CPU and GPU:
M4 has a new up-to-10-core CPU consisting of up to four performance cores and now six efficiency cores. The next-generation cores feature improved branch prediction, with wider decode and execution engines for the performance cores, and a deeper execution engine for the efficiency cores. And both types of cores also feature enhanced, next-generation ML accelerators.
M4 delivers up to 1.5x faster CPU performance over the powerful M2 in the previous iPad Pro.1 Whether working with complex orchestral music files in Logic Pro or adding highly demanding effects to 4K video in LumaFusion, M4 boosts performance across pro workflows.
The new 10-core GPU of M4 builds upon the next-generation graphics architecture of the M3 family of chips. It features Dynamic Caching, an Apple innovation that allocates local memory dynamically in hardware and in real time to dramatically increase the average utilization of the GPU. This significantly increases performance for the most demanding pro apps and games.
Hardware-accelerated ray tracing comes to iPad for the first time, and enables even more realistic shadows and reflections in games and other graphically rich experiences. Hardware-accelerated mesh shading is also built into the GPU, and delivers greater capability and efficiency in geometry processing, enabling more visually complex scenes in games and graphics-intensive apps. Pro rendering performance in apps like Octane gets a huge boost with M4, and is now up to four times faster than on M2. With these improvements to the CPU and GPU, M4 maintains Apple silicon’s industry-leading performance per watt. M4 can deliver the same performance as M2 using just half the power. And compared with the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a fourth of the power.