Today Apple unveiled its M5 chip alongside a trio of new M5-equipped products: the iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, and Vision Pro. Here are the details.
M5 chip includes huge GPU gains for AI workloads thanks to Neural Accelerators
Apple’s new M5 chip features a next-generation 10-core GPU architecture that adds a Neural Accelerator in each core, similar to what we saw with the A19 chip in iPhone 17.
Apple says this enables GPU-based AI workloads to perform at up to 4x the peak performance of last year’s M4 chip.
On the CPU side, M5 features a 10-core CPU with six efficiency cores and up to four performance cores. Overall this provides up to 15% gains in multithreaded performance over the M4.
A 16-core Neural Engine is improved compared to the M4, though Apple doesn’t offer specific percentage gains here. It simply says AI tasks will be faster than before.
M5 includes 32GB of total memory capacity, so you can spec up a new M5 MacBook Pro to have 32GB of RAM.
Finally, unified memory bandwidth with M5 goes all the way up to 153GB/s, a nearly 30 percent increase.
From Apple’s announcement:
“M5 ushers in the next big leap in AI performance for Apple silicon,” said 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.”
The M5 chip debuts in Apple’s new iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, and Vision Pro, which are all available for pre-order today.
There is currently no M5 Pro or M5 Max variant available, as only the base M5 has been announced by Apple.
Based on rumors, we’re expecting those higher-end M5 versions to debut in early 2026 alongside more M5 MacBook Pro models.
What do you think of the upgrades in Apple’s M5 chip? Let us know in the comments.
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