Apple A19 Pro vs Apple M4

There has been speculation that Apple has been working on a cheaper version of a MacBook Air solution, fit for young children or even an iPad replacement. On the other hand, Apple has been fielding more and more powerful mobile chips on its iPhone Pro series, and combined with Apple’s penchant to use common items on its platforms and its supply chain logistics prowess, it is not difficult to put two and two together and arrive at the conclusion that Apple indeed is working on a cheap MacBook Air.

We are going to examine Apple’s latest and greatest mobile chip, the A19 Pro, to see how viable the system-on-chip that was designed for a device that runs in your hands the whole day powers a full-fledged laptop.

A19 Pro

The A19 Pro currently represents the best and greatest Apple mobile chip to date. It was unveiled during the all-important Apple September event, where Apple unleashed their newest iPhone, the iPhone 17 Pro, in this instance, to the world.

Some basic specs for those who are uninitiated: The A19 Pro was built by TSMC’s latest 3nm manufacturing process, where the features are just a few atoms across. On a chip that is the size of your thumbnail, there are 6 CPU cores, 6 GPU cores, 16 TPU cores for AI workloads, plus specialized cores for wireless communications such as Wi-Fi and 5G cellular network. That small chip supports up to 12GB on the iPhone 17 Pro, but it is not unreasonable to think that a larger amount of memory is possible. With up to 2TB of storage support, those kinds of specs were fit for a professional laptop just 15 years ago.

The biggest change that Apple made for this generation of Apple Silicon is the introduction of “neural accelerators” on their GPU cores. Other than the new buzzword, Apple is very light on the details of these “neural accelerators,” other than it help speed up AI-related tasks. An internet sleuth found out about one of Apple’s patents that details a matrix multiplier caching patent. In other words, this patent describes in detail what exactly the “Neural Accelerators” do.

Based on this patent, the “Neural Accelerators” help by doing matrix multiplication very quickly. While the primary function is to speed up the calculation that AI algorithms use, matrix multiplication is heavily used in the graphics environment, such as gaming and 3D computer-aided rendering.

Apple did have these kinds of specialized cores in the past. They were known as AMX and were available on high-end chips like the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Now, these kinds of specialized circuits are on the graphics pipeline itself instead of dedicated cores.

Mobile competing with Laptop chip

Here are some of the syntechtic benchmarks obtained from the internet. Be amazed that a mobile chip has a higher score than a recent laptop chip in some of the benchmarks, especially the CPU ones.

Conclusion

The benchmarks indicated that the new A19 Pro, despite being a chip designed for smartphones and having fewer GPU cores than its laptop siblings, is competitively performant even for gaming and useful work.

With proper cooling and possible overclocking, the A19 Pro can be a lower-cost replacement for the M4 chip. So there is a strong reason to believe that Apple might release a new MacBook Air that starts at $600 to $800 instead of $999 currently. This kind of move by Apple will certainly change the game once again.

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Other Ecosystem Items

• Apple TV (Amazon) / Apple TV 4K (Amazon)
• AirTags (Amazon)
• HomePod Mini (Amazon)