Apple's New M5 Chip Offers Better AI and Faster Memory

Apple has announced the M5, the next-generation Apple Silicon chip. The M5, featured in a new MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and upgraded Vision Pro headset, promises improved performance across the board thanks to third-generation 3-nanometer technology.

“M5 ushers in the next big leap in AI performance for Apple silicon,” says Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “With the introduction of Neural Accelerators in the GPU, M5 delivers a huge boost to AI workloads. Combined with a big increase in graphics performance, the world’s fastest CPU core, a faster Neural Engine, and even higher unified memory bandwidth, M5 brings far more performance and capabilities to MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro.”

M5 features a next-generation 10-core GPU architecture with a Neural Accelerator in each core, which ensures that GPU-based AI workloads run faster. Specifically, M5 has up to four times the peak GPU compute performance of M4. Apple claims that the M5’s next-generation GPU architecture is much better optimized for AI workloads, including running diffusion models or large language models (LLMs).

The better AI performance also impacts Apple Intelligence. Apple says that on-device AI tools like Image Playground now run faster, and developers working with Apple’s Foundation Models framework will experience performance gains too.

Apple says the M5’s improved GPU prowess also powers third-generation ray tracing to deliver graphics performance that is up to 45 percent higher than M4.

On the CPU side, M5 features “the world’s fastest performance core,” per Apple, and includes up to a 10-core CPU comprising six efficiency cores and four performance cores. Together, they offer up to 15 percent faster multithreaded performance compared to M4.

While some of these improvements don’t necessarily sound that dramatic on paper, that is partly because M4 is already an extremely performant and efficient chip. Compared to the original M1, the M5 is dramatically better. The new chip offers 2.5 times better graphics performance than the original M1, which impacts photo editing, video editing, and gaming.

The M5 also includes an improved 16-core Neural Engine, a more powerful media engine, and an almost 30 percent increase in its unified memory bandwidth, which is now 153GB/s. This is also twice as good as M1. As for memory capacity, M5 supports up to 32GB of memory, which is helpful when running demanding creative apps like Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.

Image credits: Apple