Meet the new Apple Silicon M5 chip – the company has announced three new products powered by M5, which includes the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro. The new SoC brings improvements on CPU, GPU, NPU, and memory performance, with the GPU in particular getting major upgrades.
New Apple M5 Chip
The M5’s improvements include the updated 10-core CPU with up to 4P+6E cores, with a claimed 15% faster multithreaded performance. As for the GPU, it now gains dedicated Neural Accelerators on each of the 10 cores, and overall it’s claimed to be up to 30% faster than M4. The NPU (aka Neural Engine) is also “improved,” although by how much is not specified. Both the GPU and NPU also benefits from improved unified memory bandwidth – now 27.5% faster at 153GB/s – though it remains maxed out at 32GB.
As far as the devices now featuring M5 are concerned, it’s the usual refreshes with minor changes involved. In the case of the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, there’s only one change outside of the updated processor: new 4TB storage option (which you’re going to pay a fortune for). The rest of the device is the exact same as you’ll find in the M4-powered model, down to the same color options, too. Pricing starts from RM6,999, which gets you a 16GB RAM + 512GB SSD configuration to start with.
Then, there’s the M5 iPad Pro, which comes with a slightly cut-down variant featuring 3P+6E cores for the 256GB/512GB options, while 1TB/2TB models get the full-fat 4P+6E version, the same as the aforementioned MacBook Pro. Connectivity is also upgraded, with cellular models getting the new C1X modem, along with N1 chip for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, and Thread (for IoT devices). There’s also 60W fast charging support that tops the tablet up to 50% in 30 minutes. You can pre-order the new iPad Pro in two sizes: the 11-inch model starts from RM4,499 and RM5,399 respectively for Wi-Fi and cellular variants, whereas the 13-inch model starts from RM5,799 and RM6,699.
Finally, the Vision Pro headset gets a relatively big performance upgrade with the jump from M2 from its original model released in 2024, to the new M5 chip. That said, the chip update is pretty much the only change here, which brings along slightly faster 120Hz refresh rate, 50% faster AI processing, and improved battery life with 30 minutes of extra runtime. It’s also offering a new Dual Knit Band strap as the third option on top of Solo Knit and Dual Loop Band. The updated Vision Pro will be available for the same $3,499 (~RM14,792) price tag as before, but Apple hasn’t made this model available in Malaysia at this point in time.
Pokdepinion: It’s mostly iterative stuffs.
