Inside Apple's Powerful M5 Chip With Next-Gen Graphics And AI Performance

Apple just released three new products with the M5 chip: a base-model MacBook Pro, the iPad Pro with better connectivity capabilities thanks to the N1 and C1X modems, and an updated Apple Vision Pro headset. These products have been selected as part of the company's strategy to promote the third-generation of its 3-nanometer technology chip, which heavily focuses on improved graphic performance and next-level AI tasks that can run locally on your devices.

"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 new 10-core GPU has a dedicated Neural Accelerator in each core, which delivers over 4x peak GPU compute compared to M4. With that, Apple says this new processor achieves up to 30% faster performance compared to M4, in addition to improved ray-tracing engine.

The new 16-core Neural Engine is also a highlight of the M5 generation, as it optimizes AI workloads. With the updated Vision Pro, for example, it can instantly transform 2D photos into spatial scenes in the Photos app or generate better Personas.

The new 153GB/s unified memory bandwidth provides a nearly 30% increase over the M4, making it even better for running LLM models locally. With that, Apple continues to expand its offering of AI-ready hardware, which can help users from studying to coding, editing videos and photos, rendering objects, and more. That said, we expect the upcoming M5 Pro and M5 Max to take these specs even further, making the future MacBook Pro models launching in the coming months even more powerful for complex tasks.