Apple continues its hot week of announcements with the highly-anticipated new M5 Pro and M5 Max chipsets, which will debut as soon as tomorrow on the new Apple MacBook Pro 14 and 16 models.
Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max use Apple’s all-new Fusion Architecture, which combines two third-gen 3-nanometer dies by using advanced packaging. The two dies feature a new 18-core CPU that’s shared across M5 Pro and Max, a scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities.
Both M5 Pro and M5 Max share an 18-core CPU with 6 super cores and 12 all-new performance cores – newfangled naming aside, they read as the old performance/efficiency cores. It’s noteworthy that both Pro and Max share the same CPU core configuration – the M4 Pro and M4 Max differ, with the Pro having 14 total cores, 10 performance, and 4 efficiency, while the Max opts for 16 cores, with 6 performance and 10 efficiency.
Back to the M5 Pro and Max, Apple says their new super core is industry-leading and will have the fastest single-threaded performance, driven by increased bandwidth, a new cache hierarchy, and enhanced branch prediction.
The new performance cores are optimized for better power-efficient, multithreaded performance for pro workloads. Apple claims that the new CPU boosts performance by up to 40%.
Let’s look at graphics. The M5 Pro comes with a 20-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine, while the M5 Max can be configured with a 32-core GPU or a 40-core GPU.
Each graphics core has a Neural Accelerator and higher unified memory bandwidth. Apple says the new GPU boosts peak compute for AI 4 times compared to the M4 Pro and M4 Max. Meanwhile, the new M5 Pro/Max GPU brings a 35% increase in Ray Tracing.
The 16-core Neural Engine is also faster, thanks to the higher memory bandwidth.
The M5 Pro and M5 Max are available for pre-order from tomorrow, March 4, inside the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 laptops.