Apple has unveiled its latest ARM chip, the Apple M4, which it claims will offer more AI performance than any AI PC on the market today. And it's true – at least for a month or so.

Oddly enough, Apple launched the new M4 chip inside. Apple iPad ProThat will cost anywhere from $999 to $1,499. We assume it will appear in even more expensive Macs a little later.

Macworld has taken a deep dive on the new Apple M4.Which includes four performance cores, six efficiency cores and a 10-core GPU. (The GPU is the same as the current M3.) Also, there's a new neural engine, the Apple NPU that executives say delivers 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS) from 16 cores.

As you may be aware, AI is hot right now. And chip manufacturers are rigorously measuring the performance of their AI chips against each other. Tim Milt, Apple's vice president of platform architecture, claimed on Tuesday that the M4 is “more powerful than any neural processing unit in any PC today.”

And it is true. For now.

Unfortunately, Qualcomm executives are already claiming that their The Snapdragon X Elite's NPU delivers 45 cores.. And while PCs with Snapdragon X Elite have yet to ship, they're expected to be announced at a launch event on May 20 in at least two weeks. And Surface Laptop 6 with Snapdragon X Elite chips. Asus, meanwhile, is basically Confirmed That its own “AI PC,” presumably with the Snapdragon X Elite chip inside, will be announced later that day.

Microsoft's new Surfaces aren't expected to ship until late June, and it's not known when the new Asus PCs will hit store shelves. But Apple's lead, if it has one, won't last long. Of course, AMD and Intel have the next generation hardware that Intel has been waiting for Three times the AI ​​performance in its Lunar Lake chip which will debut before the end of the year. (To be fair, the current Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” NPU TOPS would be 33 TOPS, more than triple the 11 TOPS.)

Millet also claims that the 3nm M4 delivers “the same performance but at a quarter of the power” as a flagship chip in a thin and light laptop. It is so vague as to be meaningless. But it wouldn't be an Apple launch without a delicious helping of FUD, would it?