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On the multi-core front, you still get a 10-core CPU, which matches the M4 configuration found on the 14-inch MacBook Pro. So, if you want more multi-core performance, you’ll need to wait for the M5 Pro or M5 Max. But right now, the M5 is seeing about a 17 percent improvement in multi-core performance as well — and again, that’s without increasing the core count. These are all good things, but I’m not sure the average person will really notice the benefit in day-to-day performance.
You may notice an increase in fan noise, which is one of the main differences between the M4 and M4 M4 Pro/MaxWhich uses two fans instead of one. The M5 MacBook Pro is still great at not using the fan unless absolutely necessary, but when it does turn on, it’s very loud. I assume it’s roughly the same as the M4 MacBook Pro, but I didn’t have it side by side to compare. The positive of this is the internal temperatures. I’ve seen CPU temperatures in MacBooks reach 105°C when under full load. But I’ve never measured anything above 89°C on this laptop, which is a great sign.
Storage performance is also an area of improvement highlighted by Apple, as it now uses the latest PCIe Gen 5 standard to double SSD read and write speeds. Again, you have to compare apples to apples here, because the M4 Pro and Max models actually have faster read/write speeds than the base M4. With average read speeds of around 6,500MB/s and write speeds of 6,728MB/s, storage performance on the M5 is now slightly faster than the M4 Pro. You can now configure this to 4TB, up from 2TB in the previous M4 and M4 Pro models.
Pushing AI forward
While the M5 keeps increasing CPU performance, its biggest strides are in graphics and AI. No matter what you think of Apple Intelligence, there are plenty of other things you can do with native AI processing, whether that’s running on LLMs on the device through apps like Draw things or Misty studioAnd both can take advantage of the AI hardware inside the M5 MacBook Pro. There are two main changes to the M5 in terms of AI performance. One is the faster Neural Engine, which handles AI tasks that require speed or run in the background, e.g Apple intelligence. According to my runs on Geekbench AI, the M5’s neural engine is 29 percent faster than the M4, and 40 percent faster than the M3.
The GPU cores now also include neural accelerators, a feature first seen in the A19 chip in iPhone 17 (9/10, WIRED recommends). The idea here is to speed up heavier one-time AI workloads, especially in applications that already rely heavily on GPU performance, such as in video editing software. This is not unlike the Tensor Cores you find in Nvidia graphics cores. It’s hard to quantify the impact this has on speeding up workloads and make definitive claims about it, but I’ve noticed that the M5 outperforms MacBook Pro M3 by 5 percent when I ran Geekbench AI on the GPU, despite the fact that the M3 Max is a more powerful GPU overall.