Apple has unveiled its newest M5 chip, powering the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Vision Pro. Built on TSMC’s 3rd-generation 3nm process, the M5 chip features up to 10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine. Its unified memory bandwidth reaches 153 GB/s (up to 32GB), marking a 30% increase over the M4.
Apple Integrates Neural Accelerators in Each GPU Core
Notably, Apple has added a dedicated Neural Accelerator (similar to Nvidia Tensor cores) to every GPU core, reminiscent of this year’s A19 chipsets. This design enables over four times faster GPU compute performance for AI tasks compared to the M4 chip. On the graphics side, the 10-core M5 GPU delivers 30% higher performance than the M4.
The M5 GPU introduces third-generation ray tracing and second-generation dynamic caching, offering smoother and more realistic gaming experiences. In ray-traced titles, graphics performance improves by up to 45%. Apple also ensures seamless support with Core ML, Metal 4, Metal Performance Shaders, and Tensor APIs for programming the Neural Accelerator.
Regarding the M5 CPU, the 10-core processor consists of 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. Apple claims it has the “world’s fastest performance core”, achieving 15% faster multithreaded CPU performance over the M4. The 16-core Neural Engine is now more powerful and energy-efficient.
The Apple M5 debuts in the MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Vision Pro, with pre-orders available starting today.
