Apple has been booming this week. The company announced both and an update to the Mac Mini desktop computer. Buried in the , however, is the news that they can be equipped with the new M4 Pro chip. That's how it is. As expected, the M4 Pro has entered the chat.
The big news? The Apple Silicon M4 Pro chip finally offers Thunderbolt 5 support for Mac. Thunderbolt 5, with a base speed of 80 Gbps and support for 120 Gbps. The cables also offer support for dual 6K displays. This is a great help for Mac Mini users in video editing and related fields.
Beyond that, the M4 Pro chips bring a number of improvements. Apple says this is currently “the world's fastest CPU core and delivers the best single-threaded performance in the industry.” The company also boasts of “dramatically faster multithreaded performance.”
There are faster cores and a faster ray tracing engine compared to the previous generation. The M4 Pro features a 14-core CPU, with ten performance cores and four efficiency cores. There's a 16-core Neural Engine, which the company claims is three times faster than the now-old M1. The chip includes a 20-core GPU, with dynamic caching.
The M4 Pro chip also supports up to 64GB of unified memory, with 273GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple says this metric doubles the bandwidth of other ai PC chips, leading to “accelerated ai workloads.”
To that end, Apple says the chip “will deliver incredible performance for Apple Intelligence.” It remains to be seen if and when the M4 Pro will appear in other products, such as laptops. The M3 Pro started appearing in , so there's a good chance that will happen this year as well.
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