Apple is enhancing the M5 with a new neural architecture and GPU

Apple today announced its M5 chip, which is scheduled for a refresh MacBook New Pros, iPad Pro and Vision Pro headphone. The improvements to the M4’s architecture seem to mirror those made by Apple A19 for chip for iPhone 17 Prospecifically targeting AI and graphics performance in addition to the usual bumps on a year-over-year basis.

Core counts more or less follow Apple’s usual pattern, topping out with extra cores in the CPU (up to 10 total cores) and the same numbers for the GPU (10) and neural accelerator (16) compared to the M4. The differences and potential performance improvements lie mostly 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 computational power of a GPU for AI. The shader (responsible for traditional graphics rendering calculations) and ray tracing engine have also been improved, which should ideally improve frame rates, even with ray tracing, in 3D games and applications.

Enhanced caching and higher memory bandwidth (up to 153GB/s versus 120GB/s for the M4) theoretically improves on-device AI processing, although the maximum amount of memory supported by the chip is still 32GB; However, perhaps increased memory could have enabled a higher class of AI work.

As for the Vision Pro, the M5 also offers a 120Hz screen refresh – it looks like ProMotion, though Apple never calls it that, so it’s possible that its rate is fixed at just 120Hz. Whether this means a senior editor remains to be seen Elliot died‘s The dream of having ProMotion on your MacBook Air It will be achieved next year.