The news surrounding the launch of Apple’s latest M5 Pro and M5 Max chips is full of the usual levels of Steve Jobs–esque puffery. However, the next 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models may be some of the company’s most compelling—and expensive—because of these chips. To understand why, you have to parse through Apple’s obfuscating language and dig into the meat and potatoes of each chip.
The new M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros come in the same space black and silver shades that whisper “neutrality” with more indifference than even the Neutronians on the Neutral planet could achieve. They have the same micro LED Liquid Retina XDR screens and square, boxy design that’s been Apple’s staple for the past five years. Now, consider the price. The new 13-inch M5 MacBook Air starts at $1,100 with 512GB of storage; $1,300 if you upgrade that to 1TB. The 14-inch M5/M5 Pro MacBook Pros come stock with 1TB of storage for $1,700 and $2,200, respectively. That’s $200 more than the versions with M4 and M4 Pro chips. Larger SSDs can only explain some of the price hike. Now, the question is if improved performance can justify the added costs.
While the ongoing RAM shortage is certainly impacting Apple’s decision-making, it’s only when we dig under the hood that we start to understand what’s actually going on with its latest Macs.
See M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros at Apple
The M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are built on a “Fusion” architecture. Essentially, this means the SoC (system on a chip) is made up of two dice, both built on a 3nm process. The two dice communicate with each other across a bridge that provides minimal latency for communicating between each section of the chip. Most processors are constrained by size. Chipmakers normally need to stack a CPU tile, NPU tile, media engine, memory cache, and so much more onto a single die. This naturally limits the size of the SoC’s GPU, or the graphics processing unit.
Apple is not the first company to separate out its GPU from its CPU. Last October, Intel offered the full details of its Panther Lake suite of lightweight laptop chips. The Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chips with an X7 or X9 in the name hold up to 12Xe3 GPU cores on a separate die, connected with a “die-to-die bridge.” So far, we’ve seen some impressive GPU performance from laptops with the latest Intel chips. In Gizmodo’s own tests, we found the Asus Zenbook Duo with the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H could net similar frame rates as last year’s M5 MacBook Pro in games like Cyberpunk 2077. The new MacBook Airs also have an M5 chip inside. We’ll have to see how well the fanless design performs compared to a single-fan MacBook Pro.
The M5 Pro and M5 Max microarchitecture allowed Apple to craft its chips with more scalability than it had previously. The M5 Pro chip maxes out with an 18-core CPU and a 20-core GPU. The previous M4 Pro chip maxed out with a 14-core CPU and a 20-core GPU. Those extra cores provide a little extra juice for tasks that rely on multithread performance—namely, when you’re performing strenuous coding or video editing. The M5 Max takes it a step further with an 18-core CPU and up to a 40-core GPU. The M4 Max from two years ago could be configured with the same number of GPU cores, but only 16 CPU cores.
If you want the M5 Max MacBook Pro with graphics performance turned to 11, you’ll need to spend at least $4,100 for the 14-inch and $4,400 for the 16-inch. However, the extra scalability means Apple plans to tune down the base $2,200 M5 Pro MacBook Pro with a 15-core CPU and 16-core GPU configuration. The M4 Pro was limited to a 12-core CPU with a 20-core GPU. The 14-inch M4 Pro MacBook Pro started at $2,000. If you want the better version of the M5 Pro, you need to spend at least $2,400. Both the old and new MacBook Pros with the “Pro”-level chips came at base with 24GB of unified memory. No matter what, you’re looking at a price hike.
We still don’t know what the exact kind of performance the base model can get compared to the two-year-old M4 Pro. Apple claims the M5 Pro can hit up to 20% higher graphics performance compared to the M4 Pro. That’s because Apple also changed up the internal makeup of the CPU cores.
Previous M-series chips relied on “performance” or P-cores alongside “efficiency” or E-cores. As you may surmise by the names, P-cores are built for more-demanding tasks requiring more processing power. E-cores are built for everything else. As if trying to make things more confusing, Apple has rebranded the base M5’s “performance” cores to “super” cores. The M5 Pro and M5 Max can hold up to six “super” cores and 12 “all-new performance cores.” These aren’t merely rebranded efficiency cores. Apple is essentially upgrading all the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips with extra performance for higher and lower-level tasks.
This leads to a whole mess of questions. Mainly, we have to consider how hot these suckers can get and whether pushing the number of performance cores on-device will lead to worse battery life. Apple claims its laptops will still hit 24 hours of battery life, though that’s in the usual streaming tests at bottomed-out screen brightness. We’ll have to conduct our own tests to determine if Macs still have the same longevity fans expect.
See M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros at Apple
Source: Gizmodo