Apple’s M5 Mac chip is just a big A19 Pro, and that’s a good thing

Apple calls its new M5 chip, featured in the new iPad Pro and MacBook Pro, “the next big step forward in AI performance for Apple Silicon.” That for Apple Silicon The final part is key, because the AI ​​performance of modern high-end GPUs in Windows desktops is vastly superior, not to mention large GPUs used in servers.

Even for Apple Silicon, this is a bit of a stretch. The M5 is, to all appearances, just the scaled-up A19 Pro. Not that we’re complaining. In our iPhone 17 Pro Max review, we showed how much faster the A19 Pro can be than last year’s A18 Pro, and getting that kind of jump on Mac is exactly what we’d expect.

Just a big A19 Pro

Apple hasn’t gone into specific technical details or benchmarks for the M5, but from what they’ve said, it’s similar to the A19 Pro with more cores.

For example, Apple touts a “nearly 30% increase” in memory bandwidth, which perfectly matches the increase in the A19 Pro (~76 GB/s) compared to the A18 Pro (~60 GB/s). That means around 153 GB/s for the M5, compared to 120 GB/s for the M4. Memory bandwidth is good for everything, and especially for big 3D rendering and AI tasks. This is mainly due to the faster clock speed of LPDDR5X.

Apple mentioned other GPU features: The new Neural Accelerator in each GPU core is common to the A19 and A19 Pro, and is responsible for the claimed 4x performance increase specifically for “GPU-based AI workloads”, which are separate from the Neural Engine. The Neural Engine performs many fast, low-power AI tasks, while the GPU is typically used for larger, more arduous tasks that can take several seconds or even minutes, or for training AI models. This will be a big deal when these fundamental designs are used in Apple’s server chips.

Apple also mentions third-generation ray tracing and second-generation dynamic caching, two features of the A19 Pro’s GPU not found in the standard A19.

The M5 has four high-performance cores and six high-efficiency cores, which isn’t quite double the 2/4 layout of the A19 Pro, but close. Considering the use of the A19 Pro’s GPU design and memory speeds, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t also the same CPU design as the A19. The main difference between the A19 and A19 Pro processors appears to be larger, more efficient caches, and those larger caches are likely present here.

Keep programming in sync

When Apple Silicon was new, the M and A series chips were somewhat out of sync. A new M-series chip would launch with basic designs behind the A-series chips. Maybe they would have the new media encoders, or other parts.

But Apple now seems to have its chips well aligned. We’ll see what the M5 Pro and M5 Max have in store for us, but it appears that the core designs of Apple’s chips have solidified into a cohesive whole, with performance and power consumption increasing simply by adding core counts or wider memory interfaces. For developers, this gives a wonderfully consistent target across the entire Apple hardware profile.