From the article: Key information Current M4 chips offer 4-12 CPU P cores. M4 P cores are arranged in clusters of up to 6, sharing L2 cache and runni

From the article: Key information Current M4 chips offer 4-12 CPU P cores. M4 P cores are arranged in clusters of up to 6, sharing L2 cache and running at a common frequency. P core clusters can be shut down, idling at their minimum frequency of 1,260 MHz, or at one of 18 set frequencies up to a maximum of 4,512 MHz, as controlled by macOS. Their instruction set is “technically” ARMv9.2-A, but without its Scalable Vector Extension (SVE). They use 1-2 mW when idle, rising to peaks of 1,400 mW (floating point) or 3,230 mW (NEON vector code). macOS preferentially allocates them threads at all QoS higher than 9 (Background). Threads running on M4 P cores are mobile, and may be moved to another core in the same cluster frequently, and after just over a second may be transferred to a core in the other P cluster, when available. Thread mobility makes interpretation of the CPU History window in Activity Monitor very difficult.