The new M4 Pro and M4 Max chips Apple unveiled Wednesday for new, higher-end MacBook Pro models will bring more than enough power to handle Apple Intelligence and plenty of other complex computing tasks, Apple said. M4 Pro actually made its debut Tuesday with the redesigned M4 Pro Mac mini. The new chips may find their way into other machines, like Mac Studio, next year.
“Apple silicon has taken the Mac to unprecedented heights, and the rapid pace of innovation continues with M4 Pro and M4 Max,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “With the world’s fastest CPU core, immensely more powerful GPUs, and the fastest Neural Engine ever, the power-efficient performance and capabilities of the M4 family extend its lead as the most advanced lineup of chips in the industry.”
M4 Pro and M4 Max chips bring unprecedented power to MacBook Pro models
Unveiled alongside the new M4 MacBook Pro with the powerful base M4 chip, the chips in upcoming M4 Pro MacBook Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pro models bring Apple silicon to a whole new level, Apple said. Apple silicon M-series chips, introduced at WWDC 2020 as a replacement for Intel products, first appeared in Macs as M1 processors in Mac mini and iMac in November that year. Their performance blew everyone away. After new iterations in the M2 and M3 chip lines across Apple’s computer lineup, M4 arrived in the iPad Pro (7th generation) in May 2024, just 7 months after M3. Now it’s joined in the otherwise only slightly updated MacBook Pro series by the incredibly capable M4 Pro and M4 Max editions.
M4 Pro chip
Image: Apple
As Apple noted Tuesday with the M4 Pro Mac mini release, the powerful chip features the world’s fastest CPU core with lightning-fast single-threaded performance. And with up to 14 cores, including 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores, M4 Pro also provides marvelous multithreaded performance.
And M4 Pro is 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, Apple said, adding that it can make building and testing apps across multiple simulators in Xcode “quicker than ever.”
“And with the improved hardware-accelerated ray-tracing engine in the M4 family GPU, games like Control look more compelling, and pro 3D renderers can produce stunning imagery in even less time,” Apple added.
M4 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory and 273GB/s of memory bandwidth for accelerating AI workloads. Apple said that’s a 75% increase over M3 Pro and twice as much bandwidth as any AI PC chip. And M4 Pro supports Thunderbolt 5, which delivers up to 120 Gb/s data transfer speeds and more than doubles the throughput of Thunderbolt 4.
M4 Max chip
Photo: Apple
At the top of the lineup, the M4 Max targets power users with up to 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU 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. So heavy workloads like de-noising raw video footage in DaVinci Resolve Studio can now run in real time.
Photo: Apple
M4 Max supports a massive 128GB of unified memory and can handle the most intensive professional workflows, including real-time video processing and interaction with large language models containing nearly 200 billion parameters. That’s four times the bandwidth of the latest AI PC chip, Apple said. M4 Max’s Media Engine includes two video encode engines and two ProRes accelerators. That makes it the ultimate choice for video professionals, Apple noted. And like M4 Pro, M4 Max also supports Thunderbolt 5 with up to 120Gb/s data transfer capability.
Powering Apple Intelligence
Image: Apple
The new M4 chips will power Apple Intelligence, the new personal intelligence system powered by these chips. Coming with macOS Sequoia 15.1, it introduces several AI-powered features:
- Enhanced Writing Tools for text refinement and summarization.
- A redesigned Siri with both voice and text input.
- Image Playground for creative image generation.
- Genmoji for custom emoji creation.
- ChatGPT integration (coming in December).
Privacy protection and environmental efforts
Apple emphasizes privacy protection in these new AI features through on-device processing and “Private Cloud Compute” for more complex tasks. Users can access ChatGPT without creating an account, with built-in privacy protections including IP address obscurement.
The M4 family’s energy efficiency contributes to Apple’s environmental goals, enabling up to 24 hours of battery life in MacBook Pro models while reducing overall energy consumption. This aligns with Apple’s commitment to becoming carbon neutral across its entire operations by 2030.
New 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max chips are available to order today, with shipping November 8.
Buy from: Apple
