It looks like Apple’s forthcoming M5 chips are all about AI

What processors will be running the Apple bargains we’ll be seeking to purchase on Cyber Monday 2025? Presumably, Apple’s M5 chips will be inside some of them, with work already under way on the next amazing Apple Silicon processor.

Apple has requested that TSMC begin production/development of M5 chips with the aim of beginning production in late 2025, The Elec claims, supporting speculation from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. (We saw similar claims to this effect from Trendforce earlier this year, when trial production allegedly began.)

These new processors will maintain the impressive legacy Apple how has with its own silicon; expect faster 3nm processors with even better GPUs, artificial intelligence (AI) support, and impressively low energy requirements.  If the reports are correct, this will be the third year running in which Apple has deployed 3nm chips, though this isn’t a bad thing — the company has decided to apply a little TSMC chip magic to push next year’s big performance gains.

The TSMC magic show

That magic comes in the form of TSMC’s System on Integrated Chip (SoIC) technology. Both AMD and Nvidia already collaborate with TSMC on this for use in chips to drive AI — and that kind of support has become equally important to Apple, which is converting its entire ecosystem into a full-fledged edge AI delivery system.

Of course, Apple already recognizes the challenges of building intelligence at the edge — principally, that some tasks require more processing power than you can provide in a handheld smartphone, no matter how advanced the chip.

This is why Apple Intelligence uses its own Private Cloud Compute system to handle some tasks, and offloads others to third-party vendor such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. No surprise, then, that these SoIC-supporting Apple M5 chips will see service in Apple’s ultra-secure Private Cloud Computer servers, as well as across Macs and other devices.

So, what’s so magical about SoIC?

More transistors, lower energy too

There’s a lot to learn about TSMC’s SoIC technology. The technology significantly increases transistor density — boosting speed and power efficiency — and increases the maximum number of cores per chip.  To achieve this, TSMC uses its own state-of-the-art packaging solution to bond multiple chips to a single wafer, crafting processors that are smaller, thinner, and more performant as a result.

We don’t know how much performance these new chips will deliver inside future Apple hardware, but we can expect that AI will be Apple’s primary focus — in part, because AI seems to be Apple’s primary focus everywhere.

That’s got to mean the final design will focus on enhancements in the GPU and Neural engine, and likely also means additional cores for both. It could also be that Apple’s huge investments in 5G networking will make even more sense by the time these chips ship, as network performance in terms of data downloads and uploads will be of major significance when it comes to perceived performance of its own AI technologies.

Bringing the team together, as it were, could further widen Apple’s competitive moat, though the lack of 5G chips from Apple could complicate things. (They are expected in next year’s iPhone SE, but that remains to be seen.) The speculation about a connection between processor advances and new 5G radios could be off, but I feel that when it comes to edge AI, probably not by much.

All about AI?

It remains to be seen which faster Apple Intelligence services will support future product sales, of course, but what does seem true is that these new M5 chips will begin to rollout in Macs and iPads toward the end of next year. When they make their appearance, these will inevitably deliver performance increases similar to what we’ve seen so far with the M4 family of chips; they’ve already propelled all of Apple’s latest Macs to the top of the list.

The recently introduced super-powered M4 Mac mini and MacBook Pro models already illustrate the huge leaps in processor design Apple has been able to pull off, thanks to its work with ARM and TSMC. That journey is remarkable in itself, and it underlines the commitment to chip production the company has made.

That commitment means any enterprise migrating to Apple’s AI ecosystem (PC, smartphone, tablet) can do so in full expectation that they will not need to migrate again for at least a decade. That has to be a good thing for any business seeking stability amid change and wanting to deploy a trusted and secure platform for AI.

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