M5 Pro and M5 Max are surprisingly big departures from older Apple Silicon

Apple says the M5 Pro and M5 Max move away from older Apple Silicon by using an all-new Fusion Architecture that combines two chiplets. One die handles the CPU and most I/O, while the other focuses on graphics, memory, and media.

The M5 family also adds a third CPU core type in the Pro and Max chips. Apple now uses super cores, efficiency cores, and new performance cores, and the M5 Max may be built by doubling the GPU-side chiplet. Ars Technica also compares the M5 line with M2, M3, and M4 chips and notes that the biggest open question is how these changes will affect performance and future Ultra chips.

Reading notes

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• The M5 Pro and M5 Max use a new Fusion Architecture that welds two silicon chiplets into one processor.
• One die contains the 18-core CPU, the 16-core Neural Engine, and controllers for SSD, Thunderbolt, and displays.
• The other die is mainly for graphics, with the GPU cores, media engines, and memory controller.
• Apple introduces a third CPU core type in the M5 Pro and M5 Max, distinct from super cores and efficiency cores.
• Apple rebrands the old performance cores as super cores.
• The new middle core type appears to target multi-threaded performance rather than fast single-core performance.
• The M5 Pro and M5 Max keep six efficiency cores.
• The M5 Pro offers up to 20 GPU cores and 307 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
• The M5 Max offers up to 40 GPU cores and up to 614 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
• Ars Technica notes that the M5 Max may be made by combining two M5 Pro GPU-side dies.
• The M5 generation is compared with M2, M3, and M4 chips using tables for CPU cores, GPU cores, RAM, display support, memory bandwidth, and media engines.
• The article says the M5 Pro and M5 Max should still be improvements over earlier generations, but their performance impact has not yet been tested directly.
• The biggest unresolved question is how Apple will handle future Ultra chips.