Apple Silicon: Has Innovation Peaked from M1 to M4?

Title: Apple Silicon – From Innovation to Stagnation? A Look at M1 to M4

Apple followed up with M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra chips, offering professional-grade performance that challenged Intel and NVIDIA. Along with hardware upgrades, Apple corrected past missteps — returning to the scissor keyboard, MagSafe, HDMI, and removing the touch bar — making M1 MacBook Pros some of the best laptops on the market.

Apple’s full transition to in-house chips, leaving Intel and AMD behind, was a bold move — but one that largely succeeded. However, each successive chip generation (M2, M3) has shown diminishing performance gains, with only 10–20% improvements, especially in single-core tasks. This is partially due to the physical limitations of transistor density, even as Apple moves to more advanced fabrication processes.

Meanwhile, competition is heating up. Qualcomm has entered the arena with their ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite chips, expected in laptops this summer with full Windows support and AI capabilities — possibly a game-changer.

Why Apple Silicon Worked So Well

1. ARM Architecture – Apple’s chips use modern RISC instruction sets, avoiding legacy overheads of x86 chips from Intel and AMD. This makes them more power-efficient.
2. Unified SoC Design – Apple packs CPU, GPU, media engines, and memory into one chip, allowing for seamless coordination and performance.
3. Tight Integration – Apple controls the hardware, OS, and applications, allowing for unmatched optimization.

What Went Wrong with M3?

Despite switching to a 3nm process with the M3, the performance jump was modest. Reasons include:

• The “3nm” N3B process used wasn’t as efficient as expected.
• Half of the chip area is taken up by components that don’t scale with transistor size (e.g., SRAM and analog circuits).
• M3’s performance uplift mirrored M2’s gains over M1, disappointing those expecting a leap.

Apple M4: A Redemption?

Surprisingly, just 190 days after M3’s debut, Apple launched the M4 chip — skipping M3 for iPads entirely. M4 shows significant performance increases:

• 25% faster in both single- and multi-core performance over M3.
• Comparable in multi-threaded performance to M2 Max and even M3 Pro.
• Features additional energy-efficient cores and improved neural engines capable of 38 TOPS (trillion operations per second), up from 18 TOPS in M3.

Why such a jump? M4 is based on a different N3E manufacturing process — a more refined and cost-efficient 3nm node — which was not ready during M3’s launch. Apple initially used the less efficient N3B to be the first to market with a 3nm chip. Now, with N3E, they’re seeing the gains they hoped for originally.

Looking Ahead: M4 Pro, Max, Ultra & the Future

• Apple is likely saving M4 Pro, Max, and Ultra for an upcoming announcement, possibly at WWDC.
• The M3 Max lacked the interconnect (UltraFusion) needed for an M3 Ultra, suggesting M4 was always the real goal.
• Devices like Mac Studio and Mac Pro, which still use M2 Ultra, are expected to skip M3 and jump straight to M4.

Neural Processing: The Next Battleground

AI capabilities will be a key differentiator going forward. While Apple has improved, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite leads with 45 TOPS. That said, differences in metric reporting (INT8 vs FP16) make direct comparisons difficult.

Conclusion:

• Apple M1 was a massive success.
• M2 and M3 offered incremental improvements, partially due to manufacturing constraints.
• M4 is a return to form, built on a more mature 3nm process.
• The future of Apple Silicon depends on how well Apple balances innovation, competition from Qualcomm, and the growing demand for AI performance.

We now enter a new phase: real ARM-based competition for Apple, especially in the Windows world.