iPad Pro M5 On the Move: Exclusive First Look at the M5 Chip in Action!

Before its official release, the iPad Pro M5 has been revealed in an unboxing video by Russian YouTuber Wylsacom. This isn’t the first time he’s gotten his hands on Apple’s products early, as last year he showcased a MacBook Pro M4 three weeks before its launch. The video features a 13-inch Wi-Fi model of the iPad Pro M5 with 256GB of storage.

The aesthetic of the iPad Pro M5 remains largely unchanged from the M4 model, except for some missing markings on the back: similar to the iPhone, Apple no longer labels the device as an iPad Pro (though it’s possible this unit is a prototype that has not yet received final branding). Wylsacom also notes that the tablet has only one front-facing camera on its horizontal edge, contrary to Mark Gurman’s summer claim that the iPad Pro M5 would include a second front camera to enhance portrait mode performance.

Upon starting up, the tablet functions well and Wylsacom proceeds to perform benchmark tests on the M5 chip using Geekbench. Before discussing the results, it’s revealed that this new generation tablet boasts 12GB of RAM, compared to the 8GB in the base model of the M4 generation (with only the 1TB or 2TB models previously reaching 16GB).

On Geekbench, the M5 chip’s CPU (which now has an L2 cache increased from 4MB to 6MB) scores 4,311 in single-core and 15,437 in multi-core tests. This is an improvement of approximately 18% over the average scores of the previous M4 chip, which records 3,748 in single-core and 13,324 in multi-core in retesting (typically scoring around 3,665 in single-core and 13,131 in multi-core). It should be noted that these are the versions of the chips with nine cores, as the ten-core CPU is reserved for models with 1TB or 2TB capacities (where the M4 then averages a score of 13,746 in multi-core).

The GPU performance of the M5 chip shows an even more significant improvement, scoring 74,568 in the Metal test, compared to 55,702 for the M4 chip. This marks a 34% increase from one generation to the next, without any changes in the number of cores. It’s likely that the M5 chip benefits from the same neural engine accelerators that Apple incorporated into the A19 Pro chip used in this year’s iPhone Air and 17 Pro models.

Wylsacom’s video doesn’t reveal much more about the new generation of iPad Pro, which seems to mainly involve the upgrade from the M4 chip to the M5 chip. According to rumors, the announcement of the iPad Pro M5 is expected soon, with its release anticipated sometime in October.