Apple’s M4 Has Four Thunderbolt Controllers, Making It Twice As Much Found On The Company’s M3, Leading To Increased Bandwidth

The new 11-inch and 13-inch M4 iPad Pro models feature Apple’s latest M4, which is mass produced on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process, which itself is a pretty big deal when discussing advanced manufacturing nodes. However, there are some subtle changes that the company has introduced to its latest Apple Silicon, which helps to increase total data bandwidth and allows for more possibilities. That includes four Thunderbolt controllers, making it twice as much as what the M3 sports.

Having additional Thunderbolt controllers on the M4 allows for hooking up more high-resolution monitors and other peripherals that require insane bandwidth levels

A valuable find from @midnight_john1 on X shows a die-shot comparison of the M3 and M4. In the first image, which shows the M3’s graphic, there is a single block, showing two Thunderbolt controllers, whereas in the next image, there are twice as many blocks, resulting in four controllers. In short, the M4 can theoretically deliver more bandwidth from a single port, which will be beneficial when Apple announces the new MacBook Pro lineup later this year.

While it is possible for these machines to feature more ports now that it is revealed that the M4 features more Thunderbolt controllers, there are other possibilities too. More Thunderbolt controllers can result in more data throughput availability for each port, meaning that in addition to a data transfer speed upgrade, future M4 MacBook Pro owners can likely use those ports to hook up high-resolution monitors and run them at a faster refresh rate.

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Well, obviously, we see +2 additional identical blocks, which are labeled as TB in the M3 image. pic.twitter.com/PCDZJ3Z4bX

— Anderson (@midnight_john1) June 18, 2024

There is little evidence to suggest that the increase in Thunderbolt controllers will aid in raw performance running taxing workloads, but there might be another benefit of having more of these, and we may see this in the upcoming A18 Pro. With the A17 Pro, a gaming test was shown where an iPhone 15 Pro ran Resident Evil Village on an external monitor using the USB-C port, but the resolution and framerate were limited to 1,560 x 720 and 30FPS, respectively.

By adding more Thunderbolt controllers to the A18 Pro running in the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, the maximum supported resolution and framerate can drastically increase. Hopefully, we will witness the full extent of these Thunderbolt controllers in future Apple products.

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