Apple’s new G5 chip boosts AI, graphics in MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Vision Pro

M5 is Apple’s next-generation system on a chip built for AI, resulting in a faster, more efficient, and more capable chip for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro.
Apple today announced M5, delivering the next big leap in AI performance and advances to nearly every aspect of the chip. Built using third-generation 3-nanometer technology, 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. M5 brings its industry-leading power-efficient performance to the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro, allowing each device to excel in its own way.
Lori Grunin
 for CNET:
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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. 
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.

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MacDailyNews Take: The M5-equipped Macs, iPads, and Vision Pro are nicely future-proofed for Apple Intelligence.

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