Apple announced its M5 processor and the products it features with a whimper rather than a bang, which would lead the casual observer to think this is just another iterative improvement.
However, if you take the time to look into the details of what M5 brings to the table, it turns out that Apple’s apparent lack of enthusiasm is very strange indeed, because there’s plenty to crow about.
What Apple didn’t tell you on stage
Looking at the Apple Newsroom release, there’s way more to get excited about than the quiet publication of a few press releases would suggest.
The performance increases across the board are actually highly impressive. I bought the “binned” M4 Pro chip model of the MacBook Pro because there was a large gap in GPU performance compared to the base M4, but at a notable cost increase. With the M5, Apple has brought the GPU performance of the base M5 chip up to almost the same performance level as the GPU in my M4 Pro, based on the benchmarks I’ve seen. Like in this Max Tech video where the gap between an M4 Pro chip and base M5 is narrow enough in some areas that it makes the decision a hard one.
The M5 base chip has around a 10% advantage in single-core performance, and about a 17% disadvantage in multicore performance. Depending on your use case, that might make little practical difference to you. Max Tech tested the GPUs between these two chips at about 28% difference, with the advantage going to the M4 Pro binned model, but keep in mind how big the gap was between the base M4 and the lower-tier M4 Pro. That’s a significant base model uplift in a single generation. Ray tracing performance is less than half that gap too, thanks to the much better RT cores on the M5.
The biggest leap is perhaps in AI performance, because that new GPU architecture has more and better AI accelerators built in, so despite the significant core disadvantage compared to the M4 Pro, the M5 gets within spitting distance when it comes to AI benchmarks.
Of course, none of this is a reason to ditch M4 machines, but if this is what the base model has to offer, I can only imagine what the M5 Pro chips are bringing to the table.
Why the release felt so underwhelming
For spec geeks, this feels like a big deal, and I still maintain that it is, but I can understand why Apple didn’t spend a bunch of money announcing these new devices for general audiences. In terms of visual design, these laptops and tablets still look the same. This is one of those in-between uplifts where the internals are upgraded without making many changes to the outside of the devices.
I also think that the public are more than a little fatigued when it comes to AI technology. Apple’s been hesitant to talk about AI too much recently, so I get that the marketing department didn’t think this major improvement in local AI performance was worth putting front and center.
Finally, Apple might be underselling the M5 because it’s there for people who happen to need an upgrade now, but it’s really just the ground phase of a step-change in Apple Silicon hardware. In other words, as impressive as the M5 is, there’s probably a next generation that’s going to bring big performance improvements, better energy efficiency, and it’s going to offer a flashy new redesign that’s easier to market to the average Apple customer.
Why the M5 actually matters
While Apple might not want to pop the cork just yet, personally I feel M5 is important because it’s not just more of the same, but the start of a different direction. By adding neural logic directly into GPU cores, Apple is shifting from treating the Neural Engine as a separate accelerator to making AI computation a first-class citizen of the GPU itself.
Scaling this up in the M5 Pro, or Max, or Ultra, should there be one, will lead to truly impressive local AI performance. If this is the design going forward, we’re going to see significant AI performance improvements in later generations, because the AI performance will scale with the GPU. This is particularly important, because the lack of third-party or first-party external GPUs for Apple Silicon is a major Achilles’ heel for Mac users.
Another knock-on effect of this change in design is that M5 chips have significantly more total memory bandwidth, which is something that benefits all high-performance computer use cases, and it lowers the bar to entry for those high-performance capabilities.
The quiet leap forward
It’s easy to miss how significant this shift is because, frankly, Apple didn’t make much noise about it. But make no mistake: this is the start of Apple’s on-device AI era. That might not matter much to most people now, but what does matter is that we’re getting extreme bandwidth, much more GPU compute, and unheard-of single core performance as a happy byproduct of Apple getting its chip design aligned with an AI-powered future.
- Operating System
-
macOS
- CPU
-
Apple Silicon M5
- RAM
-
16 or 24GB
- Storage
-
512GB or 1TB
- Display (Size, Resolution)
-
14 or 16 inches
- Colors
-
Space Black, Silver