Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
It’s usually easy to choose a generic system model to buy from Apple — you probably know if you want it or not MacBook 14 or 16 inches Or a simple desktop like Mac miniFor example. But in each line or when looking at older models for sale, the choice can be based on the processor configuration it has. This can be complicated when comparing last generation chips to current versions. Another consideration is the restrictions it imposes SoC design, especially with regard to memory.
So, when configuring your Apple system, if you have any needs beyond the basics — typical email, web browsing, video watching, online gaming, video conferencing, basic productivity — be prepared to know your processing and graphics processing needs to ensure your choice won’t limit you. And you’ll have to pay for it now because you can’t upgrade later.
Apple’s current lineup – MacBooks, iMac, iPads and Vision Pro Headphones – Use the older M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max as well as the M5. The company also continues to use the M3 Ultra in its latest iterations Mac studio The M2 Ultra is from two generations ago in Mac Pro systems. (The Mac Pro is not a good choice for many reasons Rumors indicate A system that is more than two years old will not be updated anytime soon.)
Options currently available
| M4 | M5 | M4 Pro | M4 Max | M2 Ultra | M3 Ultra | |
| Chipset configurations (CPU/GPU) | 8/8 or 10/10 | 10/10 | 12/16 or 14/20 | 14/32 or 16/40 | 24/60 or 24/75 | 28/60 or 32/80 |
| CPU P cores/E cores | 4/4 or 6 | 4/6 | 8 or 10/4 | 10 or 12/4 | 16/8 | 20 or 24/8 |
| Neural motor nuclei | 16 (Gen 2) | 16 (Gen 3) | 16 (Gen 2) | 16 (Gen 2) | 32 (Gen 2) | 32 (Gen 2) |
| Maximum Memory (GB UMA) / Maximum Bandwidth (GB/s) | 32/120 | 32/153 | 64/273 | 128/546 | 192/800 | 512/819 |
| ProRes accelerators | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 4 |
| AV1 decoding | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | no | Yes |
| used in | MacBook Air, Mac mini, iMac | MacBook Pro | MacBook Pro, Mac Mini | MacBook Pro, Mac Studio | Mac Pro | Mac studio |
| Year of release | 2024 | 2025 | 2024 | 2024 | 2023 | 2025 |
In short, our recommendation for choosing a chip:
- The M4 or M5 chip is suitable for most users with general computing needs, travelers and remote workers, as well as some light professional tasks, such as basic photo and video editing.
- If you need to create AI-driven images or want to game, the M5 is a better bet than the M4.
- The M4 Pro is a good choice for users who need performance for processing-intensive tasks like heavy video editing, as well as power users and those who want to future-proof their devices.
- With the highest GPU core count, more ProRes accelerators and Thunderbolt 5 support, the M4 Max is a better choice for GPU-intensive workflows, such as 3D rendering, CAD, 8K video editing, animation, and AI and machine learning applications.
- Double the NPU combined with the maximum GPU core count and most ProRes accelerators make the M3 Ultra the right choice for scientific analysis, architectural rendering, heavy video editing and processing, AI modeling, and other large-scale professional projects.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased technical content and lab reviews. Add CNET As Google’s preferred source.
Matching needs to specifications can be very difficult, not only because it requires knowing how applications use different components (and guessing which applications will use them three years from now), but because performance is about balance. For example, when we refer to an application or task as “GPU-dependent,” we mean that most of the work is done by the GPU — but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the GPU is (or should be) your primary concern.
Watch this: M4 MacBook Air review: It’s still great even if not much has changed
It may be 90% of what the GPU does is rendering the objects on the screen in your 3D design application, and the final high-quality rendering is done by the CPU. A fast GPU but slow CPU may make your design and preview experience smooth but make you wait an annoyingly long time for the final render – especially if you have to iterate through variations of the latter.
M4 vs M5
Both M core chips offer plenty of oomph for most uses, and the CPUs and neural engines of the two generations are largely the same – the M5 has been tweaked for faster clock speeds. This gives the M5 a typical year-over-year increase Single-core and multi-core processor performance Across the M4 by between 10% and 20%, which you may or may not notice depending on your software.
As of this writing, the MacBook Pro 14 is the only system that uses the M5.
The biggest change lies in the GPU. Apple has introduced neural accelerators in the GPU cores, which help speed up AI-related tasks, such as image creation and game leveling. For example, in Procyon’s Stable Diffusion 1.5 image generation test, we found that the M5 was almost twice as fast as the M4. Apple has also updated to a third-generation ray tracing engine and updated shader cores, both of which are optimized to make graphics performance faster and smoother, whether for gaming or rendering 3D images. Frame rates with ray tracing improved by approximately 50% (3DMark Solar Bay and Solar Bay Extreme), and standard shaders achieved an increase of approximately 30% (3DMark Steel Nomad and Steel Nomad Lite).
The M5’s improvements may be noticeable for users running GPU-heavy applications, but most users won’t see a difference in everyday computing; On the MacBook Pro 14 M5, even gaming optimizations didn’t make marginally performing games more playable without compromising quality. The M4 is still one of the best chips you can buy in terms of performance and efficiency, and you’ll still get good service from an M4, especially if you can get it on sale. The M5 will be worth the upgrade over previous M-series Macs, especially the M1 or M2.
Go Pro (or Max or Ultra)?
The M5 still lags behind the rest of the line according to our tests, mostly because CPU and GPU performance comes down to multiples: the M5’s individual cores may be noticeably faster, but there’s still plenty of them in high-end chips.
If Apple ships Pro and Max versions of the M5, that will likely change, but the only options at the moment are the M4 generation. Honestly, if you do a lot of image or video production, model training, etc., you may want to hold off on purchasing for a while because those GPU neural accelerators are worth it. Hopefully, the higher-end processors will arrive in the spring in updated MacBook Pros or Mac Studio machines. (Rumors suggest a Mac Pro upgrade is unlikely anytime in the near future, but that’s another story.)
The M4 Max in the MacBook Pro 16 works really well.
The M4 Pro offers a significant increase in processor performance over the M5 – it delivered around 36% faster performance on Cinebench 2024 multicore and around 30% faster on Geekbench 6 multicore in our tests. If you want to play games with somewhat heavy 3D rendering, you definitely need more GPU cores than the core chips.
However, the M4 Pro is essentially just an M4 chip with higher core counts and support for slightly more memory. For significantly better performance, you’ll probably want to use the M4 Max, and this is especially true if you edit high-resolution video, do other tasks that require heavy GPU lifting and use a lot of memory, need to render very detailed 3D CAD models in a reasonable amount of time (often CPU-intensive, depending on the software), and the like.
Mac Studio with M3 Ultra is currently Apple’s fastest system.
In addition to having significantly more cores in both the CPU and GPU and supporting up to 128GB of RAM, the Max has two ProRes accelerators (versus one in lower-end chips), which can speed up video transcoding, exporting, editing, and more. The Max also supports an additional display and HDMI at 4K/240Hz, compared to 144Hz with the M4, M5, and M4 Pro. The chip includes higher bandwidth than Thunderbolt 5 (versus 4), allowing for faster delivery of large files on external drives and higher power delivery, among other things.
The Ultra chip is Apple’s highest-performance chip if you need a professional workstation for scientific computing, 3D simulation, movie production, and more. It has the highest number of cores around, supports up to 512GB of memory, more displays and four ProRes accelerators. The current best chip is the M3 Ultra, which is only available in Mac Studio.