Apple Unveils M5 Chip Breakthroughs: Faster, Smarter Technology Revealed!

This afternoon, Apple unveiled its 14-inch MacBook Pro M5, iPad Pro M5, and Apple Vision Pro M5, marking the debut of the fifth generation of Apple Silicon chips. Apple has released a detailed article on the advancements of its new Apple M5 chip, highlighting it as a significant breakthrough not only in AI performance but also in graphics and overall processing power.

The Apple M5 chip continues to be manufactured using TSMC’s 3-nanometer process but has been updated to enhance energy efficiency. Each of the three products—MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro—features 10 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores, except for the iPad Pro configurations with 256GB and 512GB of storage which have only 9 CPU cores (the models with 1TB and 2TB of storage include the additional core).

Similar to the A19 Pro chip introduced in last month’s iPhone, Apple has incorporated a neural accelerator in each core of the M5 chip’s GPU. Johny Srouji, Apple’s chip development head, expressed his excitement: “By integrating neural accelerators into the GPU, the M5 chip achieves a significant performance boost for AI tasks. Coupled with major advancements in graphic performance, the world’s fastest CPU core, a quicker Neural Engine, and increased unified memory bandwidth, the M5 chip enhances the performance and capabilities of the MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro.”

Specifically, Apple claims that the GPU, which also features enhanced graphics capabilities and third-generation ray tracing, “delivers graphic performance up to 45% better than the M4 chip” for applications utilizing ray tracing. Overall graphic performance has improved by 30% compared to the M4 chip. Apple states that “applications leveraging Apple’s built-in APIs and frameworks, such as Core ML, Metal Performance Shaders, and Metal 4, see an immediate performance improvement.”

The 16-core Neural Engine is faster and “complements the neural accelerators of the CPU and GPU, ensuring the M5 chip is fully optimized for AI tasks.” This is particularly true when AI computations rely on the GPU, as it then delivers “GPU computations that are over four times greater than those of the M4 and more than six times higher for AI performance compared to the M1 chip.”

In terms of raw power, the CPU shows a modest improvement this year, though it is still notable: Apple promises “multithread performance up to 15% faster than the M4 chip.”

For improved everyday performance, the M5 chip also benefits from unified memory with 30% greater bandwidth, now at 153 GB/s. The default RAM in the MacBook Pro is 16GB, with options to upgrade to 24GB for an additional €250 and 32GB for €500. The iPad Pro comes with 12GB of RAM in the 256GB and 512GB storage models and 16GB in the 1TB and 2TB models. The Apple Vision Pro is equipped with 16GB of RAM, as in the previous model.

On the MacBook Pro M5 product page, Apple displays several comparative use cases, detailing the M5 chip’s performance relative to the M4 chip, with the M1 chip as a reference. Here they are:

As of now, Apple has only unveiled the Apple M5 chip, and the high-end MacBook Pros are still equipped with M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. This is not surprising, as multiple rumors had already suggested that the update would occur in two phases. The release of MacBook Pros with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips is expected in early 2026. If these power increases are appealing, the future chips should see similar enhancements.

Update October 17, 2025, at 16:26:

The initial tests conducted on Geekbench are slightly above Apple’s promises (read: Very promising initial tests for the Apple M5 chip on Geekbench).