Even five years on, I’m still blown away by the impressiveness of Apple Silicon Macs. I’m still rocking a pair of M1-powered MacBooks myself, albeit one of them the M1 Max, and I’ve never felt that either one was underpowered. Apple yesterday told us that the latest generation M5 chip is significantly better than even the M4. But the most impressive thing about the chip isn’t found inside the MacBook Pro … Apple yesterday provided us with a bunch of comparisons with the previous generation M4 chip, though it did sneakily include an M1 comparison in the mix. M5 introduces a next-generation 10-core GPU architecture with a Neural Accelerator in each core, enabling GPU-based AI workloads to run dramatically faster, with over 4x the peak GPU compute performance compared to M4. The GPU also offers enhanced graphics capabilities and third-generation ray tracing that combined deliver a graphics performance that is up to 45 percent higher than M4. M5 features the world’s fastest performance core, with up to a 10-core CPU made up of six efficiency cores and up to four performance cores. Together, they deliver up to 15 percent faster multithreaded performance over M4. M5 also features an improved 16-core Neural Engine, a powerful media engine, and a nearly 30 percent increase in unified memory bandwidth to 153GB/s. The 10-core GPU features a dedicated Neural Accelerator in each core, delivering over 4x peak GPU compute compared to M4, and over 6x peak GPU compute for AI performance compared to M1. However, Macworld’s Jason Cross notes that the most impressive thing about the M5 chip is that Apple puts very similar capabilities inside the iPhone 17 Pro. In a piece entitled Apple’s M5 Mac chip is just a big A19 Pro, and that’s a good thing, he notes just how similar the M5 and A19 Pro chips are. Apple didn’t get into specific technical details or benchmarks for the M5, but from what they have said it looks like the A19 Pro with more cores. For example, Apple touts a “nearly 30 percent increase” in memory bandwidth, which is right in line with the increase of the A19 Pro (~76 GB/s) over the A18 Pro (~60GB/sec) […] The new Neural Accelerator in each GPU core is common to both A19 and A19 Pro, and is responsible for the claimed 4x increase in performance specifically for “GPU-based AI workloads,” which is separate from the Neural Engine […] The M5 has four high-performance and six high-efficiency cores—not quite a doubling of the 2/4 arrangement of the A19 Pro but close to it. Given the use of the A19 Pro’s GPU design and memory speeds, I’d be shocked if this wasn’t the same CPU design as the A19 as well. The chief difference between the A19 and A19 Pro CPU seems to be larger and more efficient caches, and those larger caches are likely present here. Essentially, he suggests the difference between the two is simply adding core counts and greater memory bandwidth. Cross argues that this is a good thing: it gives developers “a wonderfully consistent target” across Apple devices. I think he’s right, but it’s still kind of wild to me that iPhones are now essentially powered by Mac-class chips. Highlighted accessories