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Apple's M5 Chips: A Radical New Design Revealed
10 Mar
Summary
- M5 Pro/Max abandon monolithic design for a new Fusion Architecture.
- All cores in M5 Pro/Max are high-performance, ditching efficiency cores.
- M5 Max shows 10% CPU and up to 35% GPU gains over M4 Max.
Apple's M5 Pro and M5 Max processors mark a significant shift with their new Fusion Architecture, departing from traditional monolithic chip designs.
These chips now utilize two separate silicon dies—one for CPU cores and another for GPU cores—which are then packaged together.
This generation sees all cores in the M5 Pro and M5 Max designated as high-performance, with the standard M5 retaining efficiency cores.
Benchmarking indicates the M5 Max offers approximately 10% better CPU performance and up to 35% enhanced graphics capabilities compared to the M4 Max.
The M5 Pro and M5 Max share the same 18-core CPU die, differentiating through their GPU cores and memory bandwidth.
Apple's M5 Pro features up to 20 GPU cores and 307 GB/s of memory bandwidth, while the M5 Max boasts up to 40 GPU cores and 614 GB/s.
Performance improvements are noticeable, with multi-core gains ranging from 10-12% and graphics performance seeing a 20-35% uplift.
Power consumption shows a modest increase of about 23% during heavy loads like video encoding, but overall efficiency remains comparable to previous generations.
The M5 Max's new 'performance' cores are distinct from efficiency cores, featuring more cache and significantly higher clock speeds, reaching up to 4.3 GHz.
Apple's macOS 26.3.1 rebrands the highest-performance cores as 'super' cores, with the new M5 Pro/Max cores termed 'performance' cores.
