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Apple has announced the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, both built to power professional creative workflows.
Apple calls its brand-new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips “the world’s most advanced chips for pro laptops,” and has announced them alongside the new MacBook Pro. The M5 Pro and M5 Max build upon last year’s base M5 chip and feature all-new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture.
This new design combines two dies into a single system on a chip (SoC), including a “powerful CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities,” Apple explains.
The M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a new 18-core CPU design, including six of Apple’s highest-performing core designs, which it calls “super cores.” The Cupertino tech giant says these are the world’s fastest CPU cores. There are a dozen all-new performance cores designed for power-efficient, multithreaded workflows alongside these six super cores. Collectively, the CPU promises up to 30 percent better performance for pro workloads.
The GPU scales up to a next-generation architecture with up to 40 cores, and each GPU core has a Neural Accelerator and higher unified memory bandwidth. The M5 Pro and M5 Max are up to four times more powerful in GPU compute for AI-based tasks than the previous generation, and their graphics capabilities, specifically ray tracing, are up to 35 percent better than the M4 Pro and M4 Max.
“M5 Pro and M5 Max are a monumental leap forward for Apple silicon, leveraging our new Fusion Architecture to scale the capabilities of Apple silicon while preserving its core tenets of performance, power efficiency, and unified memory architecture,” says Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies.
“Both chips underscore our relentless pace of innovation, integrating the world’s fastest CPU cores, a next-generation GPU with Neural Accelerators, a faster Neural Engine, and high-bandwidth, high-capacity memory — resulting in an unparalleled combination of performance, efficiency, and incredible on-device AI capabilities for MacBook Pro.”
Apple says M5 Pro is designed for all pro users who require “robust processing power and graphics.” M5 Pro features an up-to-18-core CPU and up to 20 GPU cores. M5 Pro has four more max CPU cores compared to M4 Pro, delivering up to 30 percent better CPU performance. M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with higher bandwidths of 307GB/s. Taken all together, M5 Pro offers up to four times the peak GPU compute compared to M4 Pro and up to six times the peak GPU compute compared to M1 Pro for AI-based tasks. Graphics performance for other tasks, like games, is up to 20 percent better than M4 Pro and 2.2 times higher than on M1 Pro.
M5 Max is for users who demand maximum GPU compute. M5 Max has the same CPU cores as M5 Pro but offers up to 40 GPU cores, double that of the M5 Pro. Compared to M4 Max, M5 Max’s CPU is up to 15 percent faster, and its graphics are 20 percent faster. M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with an even higher memory bandwidth of up to 614GB/s.
Both the Apple M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a faster 16-core Neural Engine than before and Apple’s latest Media Engine, with support for hardware-accelerated H.264 and HEVC, AV1 decode, and ProRes encode and decode engines. They also support an industry-first, always-on memory safety protection mode, Memory Integrity Enforcement. The new chips, of course, support Thunderbolt 5. Apple notes that each Thunderbolt 5 port has its own custom-designed controller, directly on chip, which is “the industry’s most capable implementation of Thunderbolt 5.”
The new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are only currently available in the updated MacBook Pro models, also announced today. If the past is any indication, M5 Pro and M5 Max will come to other future Mac models soon.
Image credits: Apple
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