Apple Boosts M5 With New Neural, GPU Architecture

Apple today announced its M5 chip, slated to upgrade the new MacBook Pros, iPad Pro and Vision Pro headset. The improvements to the architecture over the M4 seem to mirror those that Apple made to its A19 Pro chip for the iPhone 17 Pro, especially targeting AI and graphics performance in addition to the usual year-over-year bumps.

Core counts more or less follow Apple's usual pattern, topping out with a couple more performance cores in the CPU (up to 10 total cores) and the same counts for the GPU (10) and Neural Accelerator (16) compared to the M4. The differences, and potential performance improvements, mostly lie in the architecture. 

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Like the A19 Pro, the M5 adds a neural accelerator to each GPU core, which Apple claims delivers up to four times the GPU's computational power for AI. The shaders (responsible for traditional graphics rendering calculations) and a ray-tracing engine have also been optimized, which should ideally better frame rates, even with ray tracing, in games and 3D applications. 

Beefed up caching and higher memory bandwidth (up to 153GBps vs. 120GBps for the M4) theoretically improve on-device AI processing, though the maximum amount of memory the chip supports is still 32GB; more memory might have enabled a higher class of AI work, though.

For the Vision Pro, the M5 also brings 120Hz display refresh -- it sounds like ProMotion, though Apple never calls it that, so it's possible it's just 120Hz fixed. It remains to be seen if that means CNET Senior Editor Matt Elliot's dream of getting ProMotion on the MacBook Air comes true next year.