Apple didn't keep us waiting long after announcing its new M5 chips to find out what they're capable of.
We got our hands on both the iPad Pro and MacBook Pro 14 powered by the new M5 chips. It's clear just what kind of gap Apple made between its new generation of M5 chips and its older M4 chips.
What's changed from the M4 to the M5
On paper, there are some obvious similarities. Both the M4 and M5 chips are available in 10-core configurations, which combine four higher-performance cores with six lower-power cores. The chips also come with 10-core GPUs, but the new M5 GPU cores include Neural Accelerators to boost AI and ray-tracing performance.
Apple also has some binned-down versions of these chips that have fewer CPU or GPU cores. However, regardless of those altered counts, Apple still uses the same naming scheme (buyer beware).
Therefore, without altering CPU or GPU core counts, the performance differences you can expect are due to architectural shifts. One of these also provides a higher memory bandwidth, with the M5 offering up to 153GBps compared to the M4's 120GBps peak.
Lori Grunin/CNET
How much faster is the M5?
Having had the opportunity to test the M5 chips in both a laptop and a tablet, we have a clear understanding of how much faster they are compared to the M4 in similar hardware.
Across the board in our benchmarking, the M5-powered MacBook Pro shows performance gains when compared to the M4 model. Single-core performance gets a nice boost with the M5, leading by 13.7% in Cinebench R24 and 18.8% in Geekbench 6. And to put that in perspective, that's a boost on top of what was already some of the strongest consumer CPU single-core performance available. Whether against AMD, Intel, or even Qualcomm, Apple still holds the lead in single-core performance.
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