Apple M5
Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors):
Built using third-generation 3-nanometer technology, M5 introduces a next-generation 10-core GPU architecture with a Neural Accelerator in each core, enabling GPU-based AI workloads to run dramatically faster, with over 4x the peak GPU compute performance compared to M4. The GPU also offers enhanced graphics capabilities and third-generation ray tracing that combined deliver a graphics performance that is up to 45 percent higher than M4. M5 features the world’s fastest performance core, with up to a 10-core CPU made up of six efficiency cores and up to four performance cores. Together, they deliver up to 15 percent faster multithreaded performance over M4. M5 also features an improved 16-core Neural Engine, a powerful media engine, and a nearly 30 percent increase in unified memory bandwidth to 153GB/s.
Previously:
Update (2025-10-16): Dimitri Bouniol:
M5 seemingly only supporting Thunderbolt 4 ruins the hope I had that the base M5 Mac mini would support Thunderbolt 5 next year 😔
Update (2025-10-20): BasicAppleGuy:
Apple Silicon: M1 to M5
Update (2025-10-21): Hartley Charlton:
Compared to the M4 chip that Apple launched in May 2024, the M5 delivers[…]
Update (2025-10-22): Jason Snell:
It reminded me, though, that I have tried to build some charts to help visualize how Apple’s chip progress is going. I wrote about this for the A series of chips back in September. Here are the requisite M series charts[…]
[…]
So the very, very broad overview of what the M5 brings is a lot like the overview of the A19: In this generation, the CPU cores got a bit better, and the GPU cores took a much larger jump.
Looking at Max’s benchmarks with Qwen3 8B and a ~20,000-token prompt, there is indeed a 3.65x speedup in tokens/sec in the prefill stage – jumping from 158.2 tok/s to a remarkable 578.7 tok/s. This is why I’m very excited about the future of MLX for local inference on M5, and why I’m also looking forward to M5 Pro/M5 Max chipsets in future Mac models.
Update (2025-10-31): Howard Oakley:
Thanks to your overwhelming response to my appeal for information about CPU core frequencies in M3 Ultra and M5 base chips, this article updates the data to cover those new models in addition to all previous M-series chips.
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Lack of Thunderbolt 5 is a good callout. TB5 doubles the bandwidth (at minimum) and is backwards compatible.
TB5 was announced 2 years ago and TB5 docks are shipping. Apple even sells a TB5 cable in their store.
Maybe TB5 will show up on devices with the M5 Pro or M5 Max chips?
Lack of Tb5 is likely a space constraint; the non-Pro M SoCs are about a third smaller. (Though I imagine Apple doesn’t mind that it’s also product differentiation.)
The M4 Pro already had Tb5, so the M5 Pro will as well.
I read the Charlton article, and it doesn’t seem to have actual data to back up any of the benchmarks, so… where does it come from? If it’s Apple, why bother including it, as it’s all very caveated but also unsourced.
Show us the data or GTFO.
