As part of its week of product launches, Apple has announced two new additions to its line of M-series processors. The M5 Pro and M5 Max serve as the brand’s most advanced chips thus far, promising performance gains thanks to the new “Fusion Architecture”. This design combines two 3nm dies into a single SoC. The two dies pack a powerful new CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities.
Notably, both processors pack an 18-core CPU architecture, with the Pro variant boasting four more cores than its predecessor. Meanwhile, the Max gets two more compared to the last generation. This new design includes six of the brand’s highest-performing cores, dubbed “super cores”. Accompanying these are 12 “all-new” performance cores optimised for power-efficient, multithreaded workloads. According to Apple, the CPU boosts performance by up to 30%.
Furthermore, the chips come with up to 40 GPU cores, each with a Neural Accelerator and higher unified memory bandwidth. This allows the processors to deliver over 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI compared to the M4. Other than that, the new chips offer greatly increased graphics capabilities, with an up to 35% improvement for apps using ray tracing.
The M5 Pro pairs its up-to-18-core CPU with up to 20 GPU cores. It supports up to 64GB of unified memory with 307GB/s of memory bandwidth. As for the M5 Max, it gets a maximum of 40 GPU cores, supporting up to 128GB of unified memory and 614GB/s of memory bandwidth. Other than that, both chips feature Apple’s latest Media Engine, as well as support for Memory Integrity Enforcement.
Apple is arming its latest MacBook Pro models with the M5 Pro and M5 Max. Unsurprisingly, the brand has announced a refresh for the lineup alongside the new chips.
(Source: Apple press release)
