Residual GPU Cache State on Apple M4 Pro

Apple silicon exposes unified CPU-GPU memory, but the cache state left after a completed GPU command is not documented. This paper characterizes that phase boundary on a 14-core Apple M4 Pro. We validate the measurement pipeline against unmodified STREAM 5.10 and BabelStream 5.0, then adapt an 8192-byte system-level-cache occupancy pattern to a synchronized Metal experiment. A GPU kernel touches 0 to 512 MiB and finishes before a 16 MiB CPU probe begins. The first CPU traversal is slower after large GPU footprints, while a second traversal removes most of the cost, showing residual shared-cache displacement rather than simultaneous DRAM contention. A separate matched-block experiment measures GPU slowdown under high-priority CPU traffic and finds background QoS close to baseline. Root PMU measurements and public IOReport histograms provide hardware grounding: they distinguish L1D refill sectors from software cache-line size, expose page-offset-dependent conflict behavior, and separate performance-core, efficiency-core, and AGX demand. The results identify a reproducible post-GPU cache-displacement window on M4 Pro and quantify a simple one-pass software recovery mechanism.