Highly anticipated: Apple this week unveiled new MacBook Pro laptops powered by its latest M5 Pro and M5 Max processors, chips the company says deliver "the world's fastest CPU cores." The new SoCs also introduce next-generation GPUs with a neural accelerator embedded in each core, designed to boost on-device AI workloads.
While the base Apple M5 chip retains a conventional single-die design, the M5 Pro and M5 Max move to Apple's new Fusion architecture. The approach relies on advanced packaging to combine two dies into a single SoC, integrating the CPU, GPU, media engine, unified memory controller, neural engine, and Thunderbolt 5 support into one package.
Both the Pro and Max SoCs feature an 18-core CPU – up from the 14-core layout in the M4 Pro and the 16-core configuration in the M4 Max. Apple says six of those cores are "Super Cores," its new name for the big high-performance cores, while the remaining 12 are newly introduced "performance cores" that sit between the super and efficiency cores in size and speed.
Rather than a pure marketing tweak, this is Apple introducing three distinct CPU core designs in the M5 series: the former "performance cores" have been rebranded as super cores across the M5 lineup, the efficiency cores keep their old name, and M5 Pro/Max add a third, separate performance-core design focused on multi-threaded throughput and die density.
Graphics capabilities also scale up. The M5 Pro carries a 20-core GPU, while the M5 Max doubles that to a 40-core design. Apple says the new GPUs deliver up to 20% higher graphics performance and can provide as much as 60% faster ray-traced gaming in titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 compared with a MacBook Pro powered by the M4 Pro.
The chips also bring upgraded neural processing hardware aimed at accelerating on-device AI tasks. Apple claims up to 30% faster performance in professional workloads and as much as 4x faster LLM prompt processing versus the M4 Pro and M4 Max. In AI image generation, the M5 Max is said to reach up to 3.8x the performance of its predecessor.
Another advantage with the new chips is support for high-bandwidth, high-capacity memory. The M5 Pro now supports up to 64GB of unified memory with bandwidth reaching 307GB/s, compared with 48GB and 273GB/s on the M4 Pro. The M5 Max keeps the same 128GB maximum unified memory capacity, but increases bandwidth from 546GB/s to 614GB/s.
Apple has also updated the media engine. The M5 Pro and M5 Max support hardware-accelerated H.264 and HEVC, AV1 decode, and ProRes encode and decode. The chips also introduce an always-on memory safety feature called Memory Integrity Enforcement.
Both processors support Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, with each port powered by a custom Apple-designed controller.
The M5 Pro and M5 Max debut in Apple's newly announced 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, though the chips are expected to appear in other Macs over time. Pricing for the new laptops starts at $2,199 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro, while the 14-inch M5 Max configuration begins at $3,599.