If you're an Apple fan, then you've probably been tuned into Apple's "Let Loose" event, where it unveiled a new iPad Air and a new iPad Pro. That iPad Pro is powered by the company's new M4 chip, a first for the company where it typically reveals its Apple Silicon chips in Macs first. Apple's growing focus on AI is a big deal, as the company has so far been rather quiet on that front.

Apple claims that the M4 chip is significantly faster than the M2 in the last iPad Pro, and Apple claims that it can handle 38 TOPS in its neural engine. That's just behind Qualcomm's claims of 45 TOPS in its Snapdragon X Elite, but neural engine TOPS isn't all that matters. It has a 50% faster CPU than M2, a four times faster GPU than the M2, and is built on 3nm TSMC technology. That TOPS measurement is fairly large too, given that the M3 was only capable of 18 TOPS.

The Apple Silicon M4 could be a big leap forward

Apple might be feeling the Qualcomm heat

Apple's M4 chip comes with up to 10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and packs hardware-accelerated ray tracing, AV1 support, ProRes, and better energy efficiency than its predecessors. Apple's strategy of launching it first in an iPad is an interesting one, especially given that it's a lot harder to unlock the true potential of an SoC in a locked-down operating system like iPadOS versus on a Macbook in an environment where it can easily be tested and compared.

Apple failed to make any direct comparisons to its M3 chipset from last year, so it's hard to measure just how this M4 chip stacks up against the rest of Apple's portfolio. Aside from the comparisons to the M2 chip in the previous iPad, it's hard to say how much better the M4 is over the M3, and Apple isn't saying much, either. This launch comes just weeks before Microsoft is expected to unveil Windows and Surface devices powered by new Arm hardware.

As for Qualcomm, the company has been touting figures that it claims beat Apple's M3 silicon, and if that is the case with M4, it may well be why Apple is being shy in sharing specific benchmark figures when it comes to M4. Given that Apple claims the M4 has a 1.5x faster CPU performance over the M2, it's a modest improvement for someone looking to do productivity tasks on an iPad, but a rather minor one for someone looking to upgrade from an M3-based Macbook in the future.