With the new Mac mini, Apple also introduced its brand-new M4 Pro chip. The most notable thing about the M4 Pro chip is the support for Thunderbolt 5.
The M4 Pro is built using second-gen 3nm technology to offer higher efficiency and performance than its predecessors. It includes a 14-core CPU that has 10 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. This setup enables it to handle both demanding and background tasks efficiently.
The M4 Pro chip also has a 20-core GPU making it ideal for graphically intense applications like gaming and video rendering. The ray-tracing engine enables smoother and more realistic graphics rendering. Apple has also added a 16-core Neural Engine for AI-related tasks. The Neural Engine can process machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads faster.
The device supports up to 64GB of unified memory and the memory bandwidth is significantly increased to provide 273 GB/s.
The M4 Pro chip is also Apple’s first Apple Silicon to include Thunderbolt 5 support. Thunderbolt 5 offers bandwidth of up to 273 GB/s, more than doubling the throughput of the previous generation. Mac mini with M4 Pro also includes Thunderbolt 5 on the back for higher data transfer speeds.
Apple is expected to launch updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips later this week.
