Apple’s M5 chip pushes AI power to new heights

Apple has officially pulled the wraps off its next-generation M5 chip, marking the latest leap in its Apple silicon journey. The new processor powers three new flagship products: the MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Vision Pro. All three products are available for pre-order starting today. Here’s everything you need to know about Apple’s latest silicon.

A big brain with bolder moves

The new Apple M5 is all about intelligence and efficiency. It features a 10-core CPU built with six efficiency cores and four performance cores, delivering up to 15 per cent faster multithreaded performance than last year’s M4.

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But the real fireworks happen in the GPU department. It’s got a next-gen 10-core design that now integrates a Neural Accelerator into each core, much like the A19 chip in the iPhone 17.

According to Apple, this gives the M5 up to 4x the peak AI workload performance compared to the M4, making it one of the company’s most capable chips for on-device AI processing. Its 16-core Neural Engine also gets an upgrade, promising faster results across creative, productivity, and immersive experiences, though Apple stopped short of quoting exact figures.

Designed for the AI era

Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, called the M5 “the next big leap in AI performance for Apple silicon”. And with numbers like these, that might not be an overstatement.

The M5’s unified memory bandwidth now reaches 153GB/s, which is nearly 30 percent higher than before, while total memory capacity jumps to 32GB, allowing for more demanding workflows and seamless multitasking.

For now, Apple is keeping things simple with a single base M5 chip, with no Pro or Max variants announced. But given the trajectory of Apple silicon, those are likely waiting in the wings.