Apple is touting the capabilities of it’s new Mac and iPad processor, but we’ve heard this all before, just a few weeks ago.
Apple calls its new M5 chip, found in the new iPad Pro and MacBook Pro, “the next big leap in AI performance for Apple Silicon.” That for Apple Silicon part at the end is key, as the AI performance of modern high-end GPUs in Windows desktops is vastly superior, not to mention the big GPUs used in servers.
Even for Apple Silicon, it’s a little bit of a stretch. The M5 is, by all appearances, just the A19 Pro made bigger. Not that we’re complaining. In our iPhone 17 Pro Max review, we showed just how much faster the A19 Pro can be than the A18 Pro from last year, and to get that sort of leap on the Mac is exactly what we expect.Just a big A19 Pro
Apple didn’t get into specific technical details or benchmarks for the M5, but from what they have said it looks like the A19 Pro with more cores.
For example, Apple touts a “nearly 30 percent increase” in memory bandwidth, which is right in line with the increase of the A19 Pro (~76 GB/s) over the A18 Pro (~60GB/sec).
