16 ms·

Leaked Apple M5 9 core Geekbench scores

314 points by aurareturn 1y ago

summarity 1y ago
I for one wonder if there’s any new hardware features. M3 introduced nested virtualisation.
- sroussey 1y ago
  I imagine the hardware based memory pointer security that was introduced in the A19. Edit with link: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/ https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...
commandersaki 1y ago
Anyone thinking Apple October event? New iPad, budget Macbook?
aurareturn 1y ago
Vs a 9 core M4 iPad: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/14173690?baseline=14173685 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/14173690?baseli...
aspenmayer 1y ago
Related, but not yet posted to HN that I know of: Leaked unboxing video reveals unannounced M5 iPad Pro in full - https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/30/leaked-unboxing-video-reveals-unannounced-m5-ipad-pro-in-full/ https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/30/leaked-unboxing-video-reveals... https://x.com/markgurman/status/1973048229932507518 https://x.com/markgurman/status/1973048229932507518 | https://xcancel.com/markgurman/status/1973048229932507518 https://xcancel.com/markgurman/status/1973048229932507518 Exclusive! Unboxing the iPad Pro with the M5 before Apple! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnzkC2q-iGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnzkC2q-iGI
- dylan604 1y ago
  > Exclusive! Unboxing the iPad Pro with the M5 before Apple! Big boy is bitching about a meager 10% increase in CPU and 30% increase in GPU as a nothing burger. "Who would upgrade from M4 to M5?" exactly. The difference is when you upgrade from older to latest. Most people do not upgrade annually. I'm looking to replace my 6th gen tablet, but now I might just get an m4 after the m5 is official and get a nice discount on what will be a helluva upgrade for me. Some of the comments in the threads you linked also suggest Russia has infiltrated Apple, but my guess would be some where in the Chinese side of the supply chain.
  - larusso 1y ago
    I also don’t understand what people expect. Also it seems that everybody is constantly grilling their machines. Otherwise I can’t understand this need for even more power. I have the iPhone 16ProMax and upgraded from a 13ProMax. I didn’t really feel a difference. Mainly because I don’t use my phone for high performance applications or gaming. [edit] typo
    - pitched 1y ago
      I recently upgraded to a 15 (from an SE) and found that the power efficiency is very noticeable. I can leave home in the morning at 50% and still expect it to last the day. Like you said though, I don’t know if the gain in peak performance is noticeable at all, outside of how it might help power efficiency.
  - thenthenthen 1y ago
    The second video posted shows what looks like a Chinese style charger.
zamadatix 1y ago
Lines up about exactly with the improvements in the A18 Pro i.e. ~+10% single and ~+15% multi.
- runjake 1y ago
  And the GPU is up by about ~30%! This falls in line with the recent jumps in the A chips as well.
bhouston 1y ago
Nice. The iPads generally measure around ~8% slower than the MacBooks, I guess for cooling reasons. So we should see approximately a 4400 single core Geekbench score for the MacBook series. This is nice. Single thread MacBook progression on Geekbench: M1: 2350 M2: 2600 M3: 3100 M4: 3850 M5: 4400 (estimated) https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
- TrainedMonkey 1y ago
  I think we will land around 4300. On paper N3P is 5-10% more transistors and 5-10% more efficiency. Naively this puts the perf lift range from 10.25% (1.05 * 1.05) to 21% (1.10 * 1.10). 4300 would be around halfway estimate. Gains in iPhone and iPads perf are heavily supported by new cooling tech. When compared to iPhones and iPads, Macbook Pros are much less thermally constrained and M5 Macbooks are keeping M4 design. TL:DR I expect a smaller MBP M4 to M5 pop compared to iPads M4 vs M5 because the latter are benefiting from new cooling tech.
- eek2121 1y ago
  Keep in mind that a big part of the huge jump in recent chips was that GB6 added support for SME, and to my knowledge, no app uses SME as of yet. GB5 is a better benchmark for all these chips for this reason. The actual IPC increase and perf/clock of these chips excluding SME specific acceleration is MUCH smaller.
  - bhouston 1y ago
    I've benchmarked these myself on things like my project's build time on M1, M2 and M3 and I did see similar gains. So I disagree from experience.
  - aurareturn 1y ago
    SME is just the AMX coprocessor that’s been in Apple chips since 2019. SME made it easier to target the AMX. But it’s been in use and available to developers since 2019.
    - 1y ago
nullbyte 1y ago
I am very curious how GPU performance will be, especially for AI tasks
matdehaast 1y ago
It feels like Intel and AMD are asleep at the wheel with their mobile lineup. I've been looking at non-apple equivalents that have similar performance/power as the M lineup and it seems they all lag about 20%+. For $800 the M4 Air just seems like one of the best tech deals around.
- hu3 1y ago
  > For $800 the M4 Air just seems like one of the best tech deals around. Only if you don't mind macOS.
  - matdehaast 1y ago
    And therein lies the problem. Apple has managed to push a hardware advantage into something that makes a difference.
  - apercu 1y ago
    I used to not, but it’s getting worse and worse. Still better than all the alternatives for someone like me that has to straddle clients expecting MS Office, gives me a *nix out of the box, and can run logic, reaper , MainStage.
    - jijijijij 1y ago
      > gives me a *nix out of the box, and can run logic, reaper , MainStage. Reaper has a native Linux client. Logic and MainStage... are you serious? :D
  - CharlesW 1y ago
    I understand the point you're making, but FWIW I run Windows and Linux under Parallels and it works great. Colima/Lima is excellent, too: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima https://github.com/abiosoft/colima Windows on ARM performance is near native when run under macOS. `virtiofs` mounts aren't nearly as fast as native Linux filesystem access, but Colima/Lima can be very fast if you (for example) move build artifacts and dependency caches inside the VM.
AlphaAndOmega0 1y ago
I own an M4 iPad Pro and can't figure out what to do with even a fraction of the horsepower, given iPadOS's limitations. The rumors about an upcoming touchscreen Mac are interesting, perhaps Apple will deign to make their ridiculously overpowered SOCs usable for general purpose computing. A man can dream..
- reaperducer 1y ago
  I own an M4 iPad Pro and can't figure out what to do with even a fraction of the horsepower, given iPadOS's limitations. It's a nice problem to have, since for most of computing history it's been the other way around. (Meaning the hardware was the constraint, not the OS.)
  - dijit 1y ago
    I suppose, that's an interesting way of framing it - yet in my gut I feel like I am paying for something that I am locked away from. Sometimes though Youtube will make the iPad uncomfortably hot and consume the battery at an insane pace. So, I guess there's someone using the performance.
  - jchw 1y ago
    I disagree. For a lot of the personal computing era, the problems with OSes and hardware were mostly a matter of technical progress. The problem with iPadOS is totally different; it's a problem that was basically manufactured in and of itself, and completely artificial at that. I do not think this is a good problem to have at all.
    - dangus 1y ago
      I don’t think you’re representing the state of iPad accurately. In iPadOS 26, more extensive multi-window multitasking like Mac was added. The quantity of windows you can keep open at once depends on your iPad’s SoC. If you have a newer Pro iPad with more memory you can keep more of them open and slow down happens further down the rabbit hole. The hardware is being pushed and used. As another example, the iPad has pretty intensive legitimate professional content creation apps now (Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, and others). So there are people out there pushing the hardware, although I’ll join those who will say that it’s not for me specifically.
criddell 1y ago
I bought an M4 iPad Pro and ended up returning it because I just don't like the magic keyboard. My current iPad is from 2018 and I use the Smart Keyboard Folio and (for me) it's just about perfect. Small, lightweight, not too expensive, easy to clean, and works great. I've been hoping there were enough people like me that a third party would make a replacement but that never happened. I know my current iPad Pro won't last forever so I suppose I'll end up with a Magic Keyboard setup eventually.
- tylerflick 1y ago
  Still rocking a 2018 pro as well. At this point I would pay Apple for OS upgrades as I don’t see any reason to buy a new model.
  - sandbags 1y ago
    Likewise. It still works fine for all the things I use it for. Long may it last!
- bogdart 1y ago
  Just don't update it to iOs 26, for me it became unusable.
  - criddell 1y ago
    I already did and it seems fine to me. I don't really notice much difference.
- wintermutestwin 1y ago
  I just don't understand the iPad + Magic Keyboard. Combined, they weigh as much as a macbook, which has a much better pad+KB and an OS that isn't crippled.
- monocularvision 1y ago
  Yes! The Smart Keyboard Folio was nearly perfect.
ksec 1y ago
iPad M5 vs M4 [1], this is coming from leaked unbox video of M5 iPad Pro. So it should be legit. Single-Core Score 4133 3748 110.3% Multi-Core Score 15437 13324 115.9% Same maximum clock speed. So assuming no special thermals solution on the new iPad Pro such as vapour chamber. This is 10% pure IPC improvements although the M5 has 6MB L2 Cache. 2MB higher than M4. Not shown here are the E-Core performance. Which if we were to trust the A19 Pro test they are 20 to 30% higher than previous generations. And GPU is also a lot faster on A19 Pro. M5 also comes with 12GB Memory as baseline, which is 4GB higher than M4 you get on iPad Pro. I hope M5 MacBook Air continues to get 16GB as baseline, looking like a very decent upgrade for anyone that is on M1 or still on Intel platform. Would be perfect if MacBook Air gets Vapour Chamber like iPhone Pro. I don't mind paying slightly more for it. [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/14173685?baseline=14173690 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/14173685?baseli...
- Forgeties79 1y ago
  Frankly it’s borderline unethical that they offered 8gb models past like…M1. 12gb isn’t enough IMO for anyone who wants a machine that will last but at least it’s a step in the right direction. My friend with an M3 MacBook was complaining about the speed. I told them that was ridiculous and they must be doing something incredibly intensive. I came and took a look at it - I know chrome tabs are a memory hog but my God this thing slowed to a crawl with even lightweight usage despite being weeks old. I told him to return it immediately.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    I am totally satisfied with the utility of my Apple Silicon Mac mini that is now 5 years old. Calling it "unethical" shows you have a weird point of view out of touch with mainstream use cases.
    - zf00002 1y ago
      Reading on my 8gb M2 Air that I have not once ever felt is lacking.
itopaloglu83 1y ago
I can’t wait to suffer M5 with macOS 26, such a disappointment. Edit: Let me double down, macOS 26 is the worst OS that Apple has shipped in the last two decades.
- pitched 1y ago
  I am very unhappy with Liquid Glass but it’s been extremely stable, as far as I’ve heard so far?
- fatata123 1y ago
  [dead]
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razighter777 1y ago
Shame this fantastic, carefully engineered and unique technology is locked behind closed source drivers, non-upgradable hardware and tamper resistent boot processes. I love apple silicon... if only they would launch some sort of product or documentation allowing M-series processors to be practical for more general purpose computing...
- netule 1y ago
  I love being able to run local LLMs with decent performance on a laptop without external hardware, but it would be really nice if there was better gaming support.
- viktorcode 1y ago
  > and tamper resistent boot processes Bootloader is unlocked on Macs. That's how Asahi Linux started
- CharlesW 1y ago
  >, if only they would launch some sort of product or documentation allowing M-series processors to be practical for more general purpose computing... Apple isn't the only company who can do this, but the reason they'll continue to have the lead for the foreseeable future is for all the reasons you dislike them. This is the benefit of near-complete vertical integration.
lvl155 1y ago
Too bad Apple refuses to innovate on AI. Epic management failure.
- sroussey 1y ago
  Blame it on the bean counters.
  - ebbi 1y ago
    That's on Tim Cook. He could have easily overridden that decision if he deemed it important enough.
- robertjpayne 1y ago
  Apple doesn't tend to enter unprofitable markets early. Name one single AI company that is innovating and profitable? All the premier modal providers are losing money hand over fist even at $100's a month in subscription fees.
maz1b 1y ago
Where's the M4 Ultra/M4 Extreme? M5 Ultra/M5 Extreme/M5 Super?
- jyap 1y ago
  Per the title, this is a leaked benchmark. It’s not an Ars Technica full benchmark article.
- pier25 1y ago
  There won't be an M4 Ultra as the chip was not designed with a fusion connector. The Extreme versions were only rumors. But maybe Apple will finally make one with the M5 and release a proper Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
  - coconut08 1y ago
    >There won't be an M4 Ultra as the chip was not designed with a fusion connector. which is the same thing that people said about the m3
    - pier25 1y ago
      Really? The M3 Ultra still uses the ultra fusion connector.
stego-tech 1y ago
Damn impressive if true, but I’ll be honest, I still don’t feel the need to replace my M1 iPad Pro or my M1 Pro Macbook Pro. They’re both more than amazing for my use cases - though if Apple suddenly took gaming seriously, like extending Rosetta to act as a translation layer for Windows games a la Proton, I’d gladly throw down for an M5 Ultra when it’s released.
- jmkni 1y ago
  Yeah they've reversed-cannabalised themselves
  - flkiwi 1y ago
    I mean, they're still doing pretty well.
- wing-_-nuts 1y ago
  In all honesty, I don't think cpu has ever been a huge limitation for me outside of gaming. The biggest bottlenecks for me have always been disk speed and memory. My soon-to-be decade old xps 13 gets on well enough, except it only has 8gb of soldered on ram. That absolutely is a bottle neck for me.
  - School-Cotton 1y ago
    I guess you don’t work in C++ or Rust. Compile times are a bitch and they’re completely CPU-bound.
    - mrheosuper 1y ago
      How often do you rebuild your C++/Rust? You may consider adding some cache system.
    - wing-_-nuts 1y ago
      Bear in mind, my personal laptop rarely compiles massive projects. I think the last large thing I compiled by hand was wine, and it's been a while since I've done that. Most of the coding done on that laptop are small toy applications to test a language feature. It also helps that golang is lightning fast when it comes to compile times.
amelius 1y ago
To what extent can these improvements be ascribed to Apple, as opposed to the particular silicon fab process node?
- nchmy 1y ago
  I'm also curious about this. And, even moreso - did apple just start designing chips from scratch or did they buy someone who already had some cutting edge technology? Its hard to believe that they're beating everyone just out of nowhere...
  - criddell 1y ago
    Right after the launch of the original iPhone, Apple bought P.A. Semi for $27 billion to work on chips for future iPhones.
    - kridsdale1 1y ago
      A lot of those guys had a BBQ at my apartment complex for a celebration hosted by my roommate, who worked at Apple’s Silicon Team with them. Lots of cool things to talk to them about. This was around the time of the iPhone 7. A huge number of them were Iranian.
    - colinprince 1y ago
      actually, $278 million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
      - criddell 1y ago
        Oh right you are. I shouldn't trust my memory for trivia that old.
  - dagmx 1y ago
    It’s not out of nowhere. It’s just that people didn’t pay attention to their mobile chips. But Anandtech had articles as far back as the A12 7 years ago where it was competing with the intel chips of the era A secondhand link because anandtech is restructured now unfortunately https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/05/apples-a12-bionic-comes-close-to-desktop-cpu-performance-in-benchmarks https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/05/apples-a12-bionic...
alberth 1y ago
Looks like an improvement over the M4 iPad of: Single Core: ~12% (3679 vs 4133) Multi Core: ~15% (13420 vs 15437) Which is in alignment historically with improvements from a new node improvement. https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/ipad-pro-13-inch-m4-9c-cpu https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/ipad-pro-13-inch-m...
- pier25 1y ago
  > since M5 will be on the new (smaller) 2nm node AFAIK the M5 is still 3nm being produced at the TSMC N3P node.
  - alberth 1y ago
    Thanks, I updated my wording as such.
  - red369 1y ago
    I frequently forget that the 2 nm naming has nothing to do with the physical size anymore. I hate that naming system. From Wikipedia: Node name Gate pitch Metal pitch Year 5 nm 51 nm 30 nm 2020 3 nm 48 nm 24 nm 2022 2 nm 45 nm 20 nm 2025 1 nm 40 nm 16 nm 2027
    - pier25 1y ago
      I'm no expert but I think it's more related to the resolution of the photolithography process.
ceayo 1y ago
Why would it have 9 cores? Feels a bit weird to have an (a) uneven and (b) not a power of two amount of cores on a processor.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Having one core dedicated to coordination tasks and maybe to get all interrupts when other 8 are churning things is always a good idea from my perspective (HPC admin and programmer). Also Apple is not shy of odd numbered cores. iPad 2 had a tri-core GPU for example.
- Jtsummers 1y ago
  Nothing magic about even or power of two core counts. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/chip_multiprocessor https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/chip_multiprocessor Lots of "odd" counts by your two criteria (though not many odd counts).
- dylan604 1y ago
  AMD used to have a 3 core desktop CPU. IIRC it was because one of the intended 4 cores was bad but they could salvage the package by making it 3 cores. The 3 core option was so popular, that they kept it once the 4th core issues were resolve with a software patch. Clever people figured out how to enable it once installed and got a 4th core for free. Never used it myself, and only heard tales about it. Could be urban legend.
  - mrheosuper 1y ago
    It is true. I remember when the process became more mature, almost all 3 cores CPU can be unlocked.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Some models of the M4 iPad had 3P + 6E = 9 cores as well, so it's certainly not unusual. Like another commenter said, the "why" can be binning for chips which come out with a broken P core.
l5870uoo9y 1y ago
Unrelated question, where are these cores produced?
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  TSMC.
Zak 1y ago
I'm not especially impressed that Apple came up with a mobile CPU that pretty much doubles the performance of the three year old Ryzen 6850u in my Thinkpad. What I'm impressed with is it's doing that in an iPad, which presumably doesn't have a fan.
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  It does not.
grigio 1y ago
if only it could run Linux..
- urbandw311er 1y ago
  I mean it kind of does under the hood right? Isn’t MacOS and by extension iPadOS a sort of relative of Unix?
qmr 1y ago
Looking forward to how programmers manage to waste and abuse this power.
- jp0d 1y ago
  Care to elaborate?
modeless 1y ago
Intel's best single core score is listed as 3240 for the Core i9-14900KS, a 250W desktop monster chip. Is this score of 4133 for an equivalent test? Is Intel that far behind?
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  Yes.
- RachelF 1y ago
  Yes. AMD is a little better. But bear in mind that Geekbench runs very short benchmarks for single core especially, so that the CPU never starts thermal throttling. The Apple chips are fast and efficient, and "feel" even faster because of the their single core burst performance and on chip very fast RAM.
  - satellitemx 1y ago
    Cinebench 2024 takes considerably longer to finish and would saturate the whatever possible heat headroom the device has. It can be treated as an accurate reading. Chart below is the aggregated result from CPU-monkey, Geekerwan's chip analysis, devices of my own and various other reports. Apple M1 series 3.2GHz 5W: ~115 Apple M2 series 3.5GHz 5W: ~120 Apple M3 series 4GHz 7.5W: ~140 Apple M4 series 4.4GHz 7.5W: ~170 Snapdragon X1E 4.3GHz 10-20W: ~140 Snapdragon X2E 5GHz >20W: ~160 AMD 9950X 5.7GHz (Desktop Best): ~140 AMD AI 9 HX 375 5.1GHz (Laptop Best): ~125 Intel Ultra 9 285K 5.7GHz (Desktop Best): ~145 Intel Ultra 9 285HX 5.4GHz (Laptop Best): ~135 Intel Ultra 9 288V 5.1GHz (Low Power Laptop Best): ~125 Apple M5 may be the first ever CPU to near ~200pts on Cinebench single-core while still maintaining less than 10W of core power draw. Competitors lose on all fronts by about 2 or even 3 generations at their respective device class.
    - seec 1y ago
      Using Cinebench single score to compare desktop chips is very dishonest. It's an extremely parallel benchmark, where many powerful cores get you a much better score. For example, the M4 does get around 170 single, but the Snapdragon X2E gets just under 2000 for multi, over double what the M4 scores. If your application is relevant to Cinebench, the X2E is a better CPU for that. To match the X2E you need to go up to the 16 cores M4 Max. The 16 cores variant of M4 Max is only available on a 16inch MBP that starts at 4.8K€; it's not clear how much the X2E laptops will cost but I would bet a lot of money that it's going to be much less than that... As for the desktop's parts, the only Apple product that beats the typical X86 CPUs in multi, is actually the M3 Ultra which is pretty bad deal because it doesn't scale very well in other ways (GPU). Otherwise, Intel (i9s/Core Ultra 9) and AMD (Ryzen 9) still hold the crowns in pure multicore score. The score of an M4 Max 16 cores, actually puts you down in Core Ultra 7 265K territory. You can put together a system based around that CPU and a 5070Ti GPU (that raw bench around the same as the M4 Max 40 cores variant but will actually perform much better for most things) for a full 1200€ less than a Mac Studio equipped like that (it even has the luxury of double the storage). If you don't need dedicated GPU power or could do with a low-end GPU the savings would be between 2000-1700€ (the 5070Ti is an 800€ part). Let's be real, the Apple Silicon SoCs are very power efficient but they are definitely not performance maxing and they are even less money efficient. It is very suspicious arguing about top performance while ignoring multicore. Now here is another fact: the M4 Max 16 cores can draw more power than the 140W power adapter included with the 16-inch MPB. It has a battery capacity of 100Wh. If you run the things at full tilt or near that, it will actually have a runtime of less than an hour. It's actually funny because the Apple afficionados keep singing the praise of Apple Silicon and many have been burned by that unexpected fact. It's easy to shit on the high-power gamer type laptop that can't run well on battery but that's actually true as well if you use the full power of an Apple Silicon laptop. You might get like half an hour more runtime but that's basically irrelevant. The reality is that everyone singing that Apple Silicon efficiency praise don't have truly demanding workloads otherwise the battery life wouldn't be a meaningful difference. High performance laptops don't make a lot of sense whether they are Apples or other brands. They are mostly convenience products (for docking/undocking) or status symbols.
caycep 1y ago
this is still TSMC n3p?
zmmmmm 1y ago
The real question for me is how much they target GPU support towards accelerating language and vision models in the Macbook Pro lineup. I don't know if Apple actually cares but they've got a huge opportunity to steal the spotlight from nVidia if they make inference competitive with nVidia chips.
- YmiYugy 1y ago
  Nvidia's spotlight comes from $30k datacenter GPUs and network equipment. So unless Apple starts making those, nobody but a few privacy conscious enthusiasts will care about running some mediocre models at glacial speeds on their MacBook.
  - zmmmmm 1y ago
    sure - that's the data center model and nVidia will probably always own that. But I disagree that only privacy conscious enthusiasts will want to run locally in the end. Right now in the hype froth and bubble and while SOTA advances fast enough that getting the very latest hosted model is super compelling, nobody cares about anything. Longer term, especially once hosted services start deciding to try and make real money (read: ads, tracking, data mining, etc) this is going to change a lot. If you can get close to the same performance locally without data security issues, ads or expensive subscriptions, I think it will be very popular. And Apple is almost uniquely positioned to exploit this once the pendulum swings back that way.
siraben 1y ago
Archive link in case it gets taken down: https://archive.is/8MdtL https://archive.is/8MdtL
hansvangent 1y ago
[dead]
ZuLuuuuuu 1y ago
Looks like M5 Macbooks will still have an edge over PC equivalents, but I am glad that with the new Qualcomm CPUs, PCs are at least getting close. Unfortunately Intel and AMD are falling so much behind that they cannot compete on laptop form factor anymore. The best Intel and AMD laptop CPUs, regardless of their TDP, are still around 3000 score on Geekbench single core.
Luker88 1y ago
"...but does it run Linux?"
defraudbah 1y ago
so M4->M5 is as big of a jump as Intel to M1 or M1 to M3?
- Synaesthesia 1y ago
  No the jump from Intel to M1 was a massive one.
  - defraudbah 1y ago
    I was checking https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks, seems like it is misleading because the jump came from parallel computation and new arch rather than pure compute power
    - Synaesthesia 1y ago
      If you used it you noticed it big time. The efficiency jump in particular is astonishing.
michelb 1y ago
I'm excited to see what the newly added matmul accelerators will do to the pro versions of these chips.
megamix 1y ago
Emphasis on "leaked". Or is this just a convenient word to use? How do these things leak? Thanks ! :)
ktosobcy 1y ago
I like the rise of ARM… first AMD and then "PC world" followed suite with Snapdragon. With the latest Elite I think that my next machine (after MPB M1, which is still perfectly fine machine in 2025) will be PC laptop with ~Snapdragon (or something similar) with Linux... I'm fedup with Apples more and more stupid changes and limitations :/ (I actually disabled automatic updates to avoid LiquidTahoe!) For me cool and silent device is more important than raw power, and we are in moment where the CPU is not that important (more so - memory)
- chk84us 1y ago
  > I actually disabled automatic updates to avoid LiquidTahoe Is there even a way to automatically upgrade to a major macOS version? Automatic update settings are only for minor/patch and security responses.
  - wpm 1y ago
    Yeah but even for device administrators using bleeding edge “Declarative Device Management” the “your Mac must be on this version by this time” thing is really hit or miss. I was testing it yesterday just telling a test computer to update to 15.7.1 and while I got nagged to hell, it never actually rebooted to start the update. This is despite claims in each of the nag messages that it would. At least Apple is still somewhat deferential to the user experience.
  - ktosobcy 1y ago
    Hmm... that may be true. I just disabled everything in preferences to avoid it completely...
- torginus 1y ago
  Dunno I remember reading an article about one of the first Snapdragon PCs - they concluded that while the CPU side was pretty good (including, surprisingly availablity of native ARM ports, and x86 emulation), the GPU was far behind typical PC offerings in sophistication, and was unable to run the complex and compute shader heavy workloads required by modern games, shader compilers were buggy, and advanced features were missing or poorly implemented, which made it an expensive word processing machine. I'm not sure if they fixed their newer GPUs but they really ought to.
stakhanov 1y ago
Is the Mac Pro pretty much no longer a thing, going forward? -- Not trying to be a smartass, just asking out of genuine curiosity, because I know next to nothing about the Apple lineup. But the naming ("M2" vs "M5") would seem to suggest it's 3 generations behind the latest?
- wlesieutre 1y ago
  Yes, it mostly exists for people who absolutely require PCI slots, except you can’t use AMD/Nvidia GPUs anymore so the utility of that is limited. Apple has their “Afterburner” card for ProRes media encoding, you could add even more ports, or there’s probably weird AV interface cards, but the vast majority of people can save a few thousand dollars and get a Mac Studio instead. Since the Mac Studio has more than 10 customers it gets updated more frequently. There were rumors about the Mac Pro getting a higher tier of “we stuck twice as many cores together in the SoC” but it didn’t pan out, likely not worth the development time compared to the higher volume products. But it could hypothetically still happen.
  - stakhanov 1y ago
    Thanks!
- HSO 1y ago
  the next mac pro (presumably next mar/apr) is the first that comes a full 3-year product cycle after ai hype started. therefore I expect that mac pro (and in similar vein mac studio) will be repositioned as ai/ml dev machine, with apple leaning into their lucky strike of UMA fit with modern requirements. my bet is m5 extreme exclusive to mac pro and 1 tb possibly even 2 tb ram, and mac studio limited to m5 ultra and 1 tb ram on the high ends. but thats not based on rumors or "news" of any sort, just from logic extrapolated if i were in apple shoes
ed_blackburn 1y ago
I keep asking, surely, I'm not the only potential customer: where's my ARM 64, Linux Mac mini equivalent? I'd settle for a laptop form if I must.
- whynotminot 1y ago
  You're not the only one. I think there's 12.
  - cdelsolar 1y ago
    There are dozens of us!
    - esjeon 1y ago
      There are several dozens of us!
  - ed_blackburn 1y ago
    :-)
- theta_d 1y ago
  Not the same form factor but here you go: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure
  - ed_blackburn 1y ago
    Thank you :-)
- Cheer2171 1y ago
  The Snapdragon X Elite has tons of laptop models and a few mini PCs like: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-IdeaCentre-Mini-x-debuts-as-new-compact-PC-with-Snapdragon-X-series-CPUs.942252.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-IdeaCentre-Mini-x-debut... The Elite X2 is near release and supposedly on par with these M5 numbers: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M5-9-Cores-Processor-Benchmarks-and-Specs.1128407.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M5-9-Cores-Processor-Ben...
esjeon 1y ago
It's about 10% increase from M4, which is impressive. But, hey, I don't think I'm not even using 10% of the M4 processing power on my iPad. What's the point? Apple seriously need to open up development on/for iPadOS, or it'll become something you by every decade or so. Who needs new model if people can't even utilize what they have right now?

314 points by aurareturn 1y ago

summarity 1y ago

I for one wonder if there’s any new hardware features. M3 introduced nested virtualisation.

sroussey 1y ago
I imagine the hardware based memory pointer security that was introduced in the A19. Edit with link: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/ https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...

commandersaki 1y ago

Anyone thinking Apple October event? New iPad, budget Macbook?

aurareturn 1y ago

Vs a 9 core M4 iPad: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/14173690?baseline=14173685 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/14173690?baseli...

aspenmayer 1y ago

Related, but not yet posted to HN that I know of: Leaked unboxing video reveals unannounced M5 iPad Pro in full - https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/30/leaked-unboxing-video-reveals-unannounced-m5-ipad-pro-in-full/ https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/30/leaked-unboxing-video-reveals... https://x.com/markgurman/status/1973048229932507518 https://x.com/markgurman/status/1973048229932507518 | https://xcancel.com/markgurman/status/1973048229932507518 https://xcancel.com/markgurman/status/1973048229932507518 Exclusive! Unboxing the iPad Pro with the M5 before Apple! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnzkC2q-iGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnzkC2q-iGI

dylan604 1y ago
> Exclusive! Unboxing the iPad Pro with the M5 before Apple! Big boy is bitching about a meager 10% increase in CPU and 30% increase in GPU as a nothing burger. "Who would upgrade from M4 to M5?" exactly. The difference is when you upgrade from older to latest. Most people do not upgrade annually. I'm looking to replace my 6th gen tablet, but now I might just get an m4 after the m5 is official and get a nice discount on what will be a helluva upgrade for me. Some of the comments in the threads you linked also suggest Russia has infiltrated Apple, but my guess would be some where in the Chinese side of the supply chain.
- larusso 1y ago
  I also don’t understand what people expect. Also it seems that everybody is constantly grilling their machines. Otherwise I can’t understand this need for even more power. I have the iPhone 16ProMax and upgraded from a 13ProMax. I didn’t really feel a difference. Mainly because I don’t use my phone for high performance applications or gaming. [edit] typo
  - pitched 1y ago
    I recently upgraded to a 15 (from an SE) and found that the power efficiency is very noticeable. I can leave home in the morning at 50% and still expect it to last the day. Like you said though, I don’t know if the gain in peak performance is noticeable at all, outside of how it might help power efficiency.
- thenthenthen 1y ago
  The second video posted shows what looks like a Chinese style charger.

zamadatix 1y ago

Lines up about exactly with the improvements in the A18 Pro i.e. ~+10% single and ~+15% multi.

runjake 1y ago
And the GPU is up by about ~30%! This falls in line with the recent jumps in the A chips as well.

bhouston 1y ago

Nice. The iPads generally measure around ~8% slower than the MacBooks, I guess for cooling reasons. So we should see approximately a 4400 single core Geekbench score for the MacBook series. This is nice. Single thread MacBook progression on Geekbench: M1: 2350 M2: 2600 M3: 3100 M4: 3850 M5: 4400 (estimated) https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

TrainedMonkey 1y ago
I think we will land around 4300. On paper N3P is 5-10% more transistors and 5-10% more efficiency. Naively this puts the perf lift range from 10.25% (1.05 * 1.05) to 21% (1.10 * 1.10). 4300 would be around halfway estimate. Gains in iPhone and iPads perf are heavily supported by new cooling tech. When compared to iPhones and iPads, Macbook Pros are much less thermally constrained and M5 Macbooks are keeping M4 design. TL:DR I expect a smaller MBP M4 to M5 pop compared to iPads M4 vs M5 because the latter are benefiting from new cooling tech.
eek2121 1y ago
Keep in mind that a big part of the huge jump in recent chips was that GB6 added support for SME, and to my knowledge, no app uses SME as of yet. GB5 is a better benchmark for all these chips for this reason. The actual IPC increase and perf/clock of these chips excluding SME specific acceleration is MUCH smaller.
- bhouston 1y ago
  I've benchmarked these myself on things like my project's build time on M1, M2 and M3 and I did see similar gains. So I disagree from experience.
- aurareturn 1y ago
  SME is just the AMX coprocessor that’s been in Apple chips since 2019. SME made it easier to target the AMX. But it’s been in use and available to developers since 2019.
  - 1y ago

nullbyte 1y ago

I am very curious how GPU performance will be, especially for AI tasks

matdehaast 1y ago

It feels like Intel and AMD are asleep at the wheel with their mobile lineup. I've been looking at non-apple equivalents that have similar performance/power as the M lineup and it seems they all lag about 20%+. For $800 the M4 Air just seems like one of the best tech deals around.

hu3 1y ago
> For $800 the M4 Air just seems like one of the best tech deals around. Only if you don't mind macOS.
- matdehaast 1y ago
  And therein lies the problem. Apple has managed to push a hardware advantage into something that makes a difference.
- apercu 1y ago
  I used to not, but it’s getting worse and worse. Still better than all the alternatives for someone like me that has to straddle clients expecting MS Office, gives me a *nix out of the box, and can run logic, reaper , MainStage.
  - jijijijij 1y ago
    > gives me a *nix out of the box, and can run logic, reaper , MainStage. Reaper has a native Linux client. Logic and MainStage... are you serious? :D
- CharlesW 1y ago
  I understand the point you're making, but FWIW I run Windows and Linux under Parallels and it works great. Colima/Lima is excellent, too: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima https://github.com/abiosoft/colima Windows on ARM performance is near native when run under macOS. `virtiofs` mounts aren't nearly as fast as native Linux filesystem access, but Colima/Lima can be very fast if you (for example) move build artifacts and dependency caches inside the VM.

AlphaAndOmega0 1y ago

I own an M4 iPad Pro and can't figure out what to do with even a fraction of the horsepower, given iPadOS's limitations. The rumors about an upcoming touchscreen Mac are interesting, perhaps Apple will deign to make their ridiculously overpowered SOCs usable for general purpose computing. A man can dream..

reaperducer 1y ago
I own an M4 iPad Pro and can't figure out what to do with even a fraction of the horsepower, given iPadOS's limitations. It's a nice problem to have, since for most of computing history it's been the other way around. (Meaning the hardware was the constraint, not the OS.)
- dijit 1y ago
  I suppose, that's an interesting way of framing it - yet in my gut I feel like I am paying for something that I am locked away from. Sometimes though Youtube will make the iPad uncomfortably hot and consume the battery at an insane pace. So, I guess there's someone using the performance.
- jchw 1y ago
  I disagree. For a lot of the personal computing era, the problems with OSes and hardware were mostly a matter of technical progress. The problem with iPadOS is totally different; it's a problem that was basically manufactured in and of itself, and completely artificial at that. I do not think this is a good problem to have at all.
  - dangus 1y ago
    I don’t think you’re representing the state of iPad accurately. In iPadOS 26, more extensive multi-window multitasking like Mac was added. The quantity of windows you can keep open at once depends on your iPad’s SoC. If you have a newer Pro iPad with more memory you can keep more of them open and slow down happens further down the rabbit hole. The hardware is being pushed and used. As another example, the iPad has pretty intensive legitimate professional content creation apps now (Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, and others). So there are people out there pushing the hardware, although I’ll join those who will say that it’s not for me specifically.

criddell 1y ago

I bought an M4 iPad Pro and ended up returning it because I just don't like the magic keyboard. My current iPad is from 2018 and I use the Smart Keyboard Folio and (for me) it's just about perfect. Small, lightweight, not too expensive, easy to clean, and works great. I've been hoping there were enough people like me that a third party would make a replacement but that never happened. I know my current iPad Pro won't last forever so I suppose I'll end up with a Magic Keyboard setup eventually.

tylerflick 1y ago
Still rocking a 2018 pro as well. At this point I would pay Apple for OS upgrades as I don’t see any reason to buy a new model.
- sandbags 1y ago
  Likewise. It still works fine for all the things I use it for. Long may it last!
bogdart 1y ago
Just don't update it to iOs 26, for me it became unusable.
- criddell 1y ago
  I already did and it seems fine to me. I don't really notice much difference.
wintermutestwin 1y ago
I just don't understand the iPad + Magic Keyboard. Combined, they weigh as much as a macbook, which has a much better pad+KB and an OS that isn't crippled.
monocularvision 1y ago
Yes! The Smart Keyboard Folio was nearly perfect.

ksec 1y ago

iPad M5 vs M4 [1], this is coming from leaked unbox video of M5 iPad Pro. So it should be legit. Single-Core Score 4133 3748 110.3% Multi-Core Score 15437 13324 115.9% Same maximum clock speed. So assuming no special thermals solution on the new iPad Pro such as vapour chamber. This is 10% pure IPC improvements although the M5 has 6MB L2 Cache. 2MB higher than M4. Not shown here are the E-Core performance. Which if we were to trust the A19 Pro test they are 20 to 30% higher than previous generations. And GPU is also a lot faster on A19 Pro. M5 also comes with 12GB Memory as baseline, which is 4GB higher than M4 you get on iPad Pro. I hope M5 MacBook Air continues to get 16GB as baseline, looking like a very decent upgrade for anyone that is on M1 or still on Intel platform. Would be perfect if MacBook Air gets Vapour Chamber like iPhone Pro. I don't mind paying slightly more for it. [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/14173685?baseline=14173690 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/14173685?baseli...

Forgeties79 1y ago
Frankly it’s borderline unethical that they offered 8gb models past like…M1. 12gb isn’t enough IMO for anyone who wants a machine that will last but at least it’s a step in the right direction. My friend with an M3 MacBook was complaining about the speed. I told them that was ridiculous and they must be doing something incredibly intensive. I came and took a look at it - I know chrome tabs are a memory hog but my God this thing slowed to a crawl with even lightweight usage despite being weeks old. I told him to return it immediately.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  I am totally satisfied with the utility of my Apple Silicon Mac mini that is now 5 years old. Calling it "unethical" shows you have a weird point of view out of touch with mainstream use cases.
  - zf00002 1y ago
    Reading on my 8gb M2 Air that I have not once ever felt is lacking.

itopaloglu83 1y ago

I can’t wait to suffer M5 with macOS 26, such a disappointment. Edit: Let me double down, macOS 26 is the worst OS that Apple has shipped in the last two decades.

pitched 1y ago
I am very unhappy with Liquid Glass but it’s been extremely stable, as far as I’ve heard so far?
fatata123 1y ago
[dead]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

razighter777 1y ago

Shame this fantastic, carefully engineered and unique technology is locked behind closed source drivers, non-upgradable hardware and tamper resistent boot processes. I love apple silicon... if only they would launch some sort of product or documentation allowing M-series processors to be practical for more general purpose computing...

netule 1y ago
I love being able to run local LLMs with decent performance on a laptop without external hardware, but it would be really nice if there was better gaming support.
viktorcode 1y ago
> and tamper resistent boot processes Bootloader is unlocked on Macs. That's how Asahi Linux started
CharlesW 1y ago
>, if only they would launch some sort of product or documentation allowing M-series processors to be practical for more general purpose computing... Apple isn't the only company who can do this, but the reason they'll continue to have the lead for the foreseeable future is for all the reasons you dislike them. This is the benefit of near-complete vertical integration.

lvl155 1y ago

Too bad Apple refuses to innovate on AI. Epic management failure.

sroussey 1y ago
Blame it on the bean counters.
- ebbi 1y ago
  That's on Tim Cook. He could have easily overridden that decision if he deemed it important enough.
robertjpayne 1y ago
Apple doesn't tend to enter unprofitable markets early. Name one single AI company that is innovating and profitable? All the premier modal providers are losing money hand over fist even at $100's a month in subscription fees.

maz1b 1y ago

Where's the M4 Ultra/M4 Extreme? M5 Ultra/M5 Extreme/M5 Super?

jyap 1y ago
Per the title, this is a leaked benchmark. It’s not an Ars Technica full benchmark article.
pier25 1y ago
There won't be an M4 Ultra as the chip was not designed with a fusion connector. The Extreme versions were only rumors. But maybe Apple will finally make one with the M5 and release a proper Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
- coconut08 1y ago
  >There won't be an M4 Ultra as the chip was not designed with a fusion connector. which is the same thing that people said about the m3
  - pier25 1y ago
    Really? The M3 Ultra still uses the ultra fusion connector.

stego-tech 1y ago

Damn impressive if true, but I’ll be honest, I still don’t feel the need to replace my M1 iPad Pro or my M1 Pro Macbook Pro. They’re both more than amazing for my use cases - though if Apple suddenly took gaming seriously, like extending Rosetta to act as a translation layer for Windows games a la Proton, I’d gladly throw down for an M5 Ultra when it’s released.

jmkni 1y ago
Yeah they've reversed-cannabalised themselves
- flkiwi 1y ago
  I mean, they're still doing pretty well.
wing-_-nuts 1y ago
In all honesty, I don't think cpu has ever been a huge limitation for me outside of gaming. The biggest bottlenecks for me have always been disk speed and memory. My soon-to-be decade old xps 13 gets on well enough, except it only has 8gb of soldered on ram. That absolutely is a bottle neck for me.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  I guess you don’t work in C++ or Rust. Compile times are a bitch and they’re completely CPU-bound.
  - mrheosuper 1y ago
    How often do you rebuild your C++/Rust? You may consider adding some cache system.
  - wing-_-nuts 1y ago
    Bear in mind, my personal laptop rarely compiles massive projects. I think the last large thing I compiled by hand was wine, and it's been a while since I've done that. Most of the coding done on that laptop are small toy applications to test a language feature. It also helps that golang is lightning fast when it comes to compile times.

amelius 1y ago

To what extent can these improvements be ascribed to Apple, as opposed to the particular silicon fab process node?

nchmy 1y ago
I'm also curious about this. And, even moreso - did apple just start designing chips from scratch or did they buy someone who already had some cutting edge technology? Its hard to believe that they're beating everyone just out of nowhere...
- criddell 1y ago
  Right after the launch of the original iPhone, Apple bought P.A. Semi for $27 billion to work on chips for future iPhones.
  - kridsdale1 1y ago
    A lot of those guys had a BBQ at my apartment complex for a celebration hosted by my roommate, who worked at Apple’s Silicon Team with them. Lots of cool things to talk to them about. This was around the time of the iPhone 7. A huge number of them were Iranian.
  - colinprince 1y ago
    actually, $278 million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
    - criddell 1y ago
      Oh right you are. I shouldn't trust my memory for trivia that old.
- dagmx 1y ago
  It’s not out of nowhere. It’s just that people didn’t pay attention to their mobile chips. But Anandtech had articles as far back as the A12 7 years ago where it was competing with the intel chips of the era A secondhand link because anandtech is restructured now unfortunately https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/05/apples-a12-bionic-comes-close-to-desktop-cpu-performance-in-benchmarks https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/05/apples-a12-bionic...

alberth 1y ago

Looks like an improvement over the M4 iPad of: Single Core: ~12% (3679 vs 4133) Multi Core: ~15% (13420 vs 15437) Which is in alignment historically with improvements from a new node improvement. https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/ipad-pro-13-inch-m4-9c-cpu https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/ipad-pro-13-inch-m...

pier25 1y ago
> since M5 will be on the new (smaller) 2nm node AFAIK the M5 is still 3nm being produced at the TSMC N3P node.
- alberth 1y ago
  Thanks, I updated my wording as such.
- red369 1y ago
  I frequently forget that the 2 nm naming has nothing to do with the physical size anymore. I hate that naming system. From Wikipedia: Node name Gate pitch Metal pitch Year 5 nm 51 nm 30 nm 2020 3 nm 48 nm 24 nm 2022 2 nm 45 nm 20 nm 2025 1 nm 40 nm 16 nm 2027
  - pier25 1y ago
    I'm no expert but I think it's more related to the resolution of the photolithography process.

ceayo 1y ago

Why would it have 9 cores? Feels a bit weird to have an (a) uneven and (b) not a power of two amount of cores on a processor.

bayindirh 1y ago
Having one core dedicated to coordination tasks and maybe to get all interrupts when other 8 are churning things is always a good idea from my perspective (HPC admin and programmer). Also Apple is not shy of odd numbered cores. iPad 2 had a tri-core GPU for example.
Jtsummers 1y ago
Nothing magic about even or power of two core counts. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/chip_multiprocessor https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/chip_multiprocessor Lots of "odd" counts by your two criteria (though not many odd counts).
dylan604 1y ago
AMD used to have a 3 core desktop CPU. IIRC it was because one of the intended 4 cores was bad but they could salvage the package by making it 3 cores. The 3 core option was so popular, that they kept it once the 4th core issues were resolve with a software patch. Clever people figured out how to enable it once installed and got a 4th core for free. Never used it myself, and only heard tales about it. Could be urban legend.
- mrheosuper 1y ago
  It is true. I remember when the process became more mature, almost all 3 cores CPU can be unlocked.
zamadatix 1y ago
Some models of the M4 iPad had 3P + 6E = 9 cores as well, so it's certainly not unusual. Like another commenter said, the "why" can be binning for chips which come out with a broken P core.

l5870uoo9y 1y ago

Unrelated question, where are these cores produced?

kridsdale1 1y ago
TSMC.

Zak 1y ago

I'm not especially impressed that Apple came up with a mobile CPU that pretty much doubles the performance of the three year old Ryzen 6850u in my Thinkpad. What I'm impressed with is it's doing that in an iPad, which presumably doesn't have a fan.

kridsdale1 1y ago
It does not.

grigio 1y ago

if only it could run Linux..

urbandw311er 1y ago
I mean it kind of does under the hood right? Isn’t MacOS and by extension iPadOS a sort of relative of Unix?

qmr 1y ago

Looking forward to how programmers manage to waste and abuse this power.

jp0d 1y ago
Care to elaborate?

modeless 1y ago

Intel's best single core score is listed as 3240 for the Core i9-14900KS, a 250W desktop monster chip. Is this score of 4133 for an equivalent test? Is Intel that far behind?

kridsdale1 1y ago
Yes.
RachelF 1y ago
Yes. AMD is a little better. But bear in mind that Geekbench runs very short benchmarks for single core especially, so that the CPU never starts thermal throttling. The Apple chips are fast and efficient, and "feel" even faster because of the their single core burst performance and on chip very fast RAM.
- satellitemx 1y ago
  Cinebench 2024 takes considerably longer to finish and would saturate the whatever possible heat headroom the device has. It can be treated as an accurate reading. Chart below is the aggregated result from CPU-monkey, Geekerwan's chip analysis, devices of my own and various other reports. Apple M1 series 3.2GHz 5W: ~115 Apple M2 series 3.5GHz 5W: ~120 Apple M3 series 4GHz 7.5W: ~140 Apple M4 series 4.4GHz 7.5W: ~170 Snapdragon X1E 4.3GHz 10-20W: ~140 Snapdragon X2E 5GHz >20W: ~160 AMD 9950X 5.7GHz (Desktop Best): ~140 AMD AI 9 HX 375 5.1GHz (Laptop Best): ~125 Intel Ultra 9 285K 5.7GHz (Desktop Best): ~145 Intel Ultra 9 285HX 5.4GHz (Laptop Best): ~135 Intel Ultra 9 288V 5.1GHz (Low Power Laptop Best): ~125 Apple M5 may be the first ever CPU to near ~200pts on Cinebench single-core while still maintaining less than 10W of core power draw. Competitors lose on all fronts by about 2 or even 3 generations at their respective device class.
  - seec 1y ago
    Using Cinebench single score to compare desktop chips is very dishonest. It's an extremely parallel benchmark, where many powerful cores get you a much better score. For example, the M4 does get around 170 single, but the Snapdragon X2E gets just under 2000 for multi, over double what the M4 scores. If your application is relevant to Cinebench, the X2E is a better CPU for that. To match the X2E you need to go up to the 16 cores M4 Max. The 16 cores variant of M4 Max is only available on a 16inch MBP that starts at 4.8K€; it's not clear how much the X2E laptops will cost but I would bet a lot of money that it's going to be much less than that... As for the desktop's parts, the only Apple product that beats the typical X86 CPUs in multi, is actually the M3 Ultra which is pretty bad deal because it doesn't scale very well in other ways (GPU). Otherwise, Intel (i9s/Core Ultra 9) and AMD (Ryzen 9) still hold the crowns in pure multicore score. The score of an M4 Max 16 cores, actually puts you down in Core Ultra 7 265K territory. You can put together a system based around that CPU and a 5070Ti GPU (that raw bench around the same as the M4 Max 40 cores variant but will actually perform much better for most things) for a full 1200€ less than a Mac Studio equipped like that (it even has the luxury of double the storage). If you don't need dedicated GPU power or could do with a low-end GPU the savings would be between 2000-1700€ (the 5070Ti is an 800€ part). Let's be real, the Apple Silicon SoCs are very power efficient but they are definitely not performance maxing and they are even less money efficient. It is very suspicious arguing about top performance while ignoring multicore. Now here is another fact: the M4 Max 16 cores can draw more power than the 140W power adapter included with the 16-inch MPB. It has a battery capacity of 100Wh. If you run the things at full tilt or near that, it will actually have a runtime of less than an hour. It's actually funny because the Apple afficionados keep singing the praise of Apple Silicon and many have been burned by that unexpected fact. It's easy to shit on the high-power gamer type laptop that can't run well on battery but that's actually true as well if you use the full power of an Apple Silicon laptop. You might get like half an hour more runtime but that's basically irrelevant. The reality is that everyone singing that Apple Silicon efficiency praise don't have truly demanding workloads otherwise the battery life wouldn't be a meaningful difference. High performance laptops don't make a lot of sense whether they are Apples or other brands. They are mostly convenience products (for docking/undocking) or status symbols.

caycep 1y ago

this is still TSMC n3p?

zmmmmm 1y ago

The real question for me is how much they target GPU support towards accelerating language and vision models in the Macbook Pro lineup. I don't know if Apple actually cares but they've got a huge opportunity to steal the spotlight from nVidia if they make inference competitive with nVidia chips.

YmiYugy 1y ago
Nvidia's spotlight comes from $30k datacenter GPUs and network equipment. So unless Apple starts making those, nobody but a few privacy conscious enthusiasts will care about running some mediocre models at glacial speeds on their MacBook.
- zmmmmm 1y ago
  sure - that's the data center model and nVidia will probably always own that. But I disagree that only privacy conscious enthusiasts will want to run locally in the end. Right now in the hype froth and bubble and while SOTA advances fast enough that getting the very latest hosted model is super compelling, nobody cares about anything. Longer term, especially once hosted services start deciding to try and make real money (read: ads, tracking, data mining, etc) this is going to change a lot. If you can get close to the same performance locally without data security issues, ads or expensive subscriptions, I think it will be very popular. And Apple is almost uniquely positioned to exploit this once the pendulum swings back that way.

siraben 1y ago

Archive link in case it gets taken down: https://archive.is/8MdtL https://archive.is/8MdtL

hansvangent 1y ago

[dead]

ZuLuuuuuu 1y ago

Looks like M5 Macbooks will still have an edge over PC equivalents, but I am glad that with the new Qualcomm CPUs, PCs are at least getting close. Unfortunately Intel and AMD are falling so much behind that they cannot compete on laptop form factor anymore. The best Intel and AMD laptop CPUs, regardless of their TDP, are still around 3000 score on Geekbench single core.

Luker88 1y ago

"...but does it run Linux?"

defraudbah 1y ago

so M4->M5 is as big of a jump as Intel to M1 or M1 to M3?

Synaesthesia 1y ago
No the jump from Intel to M1 was a massive one.
- defraudbah 1y ago
  I was checking https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks, seems like it is misleading because the jump came from parallel computation and new arch rather than pure compute power
  - Synaesthesia 1y ago
    If you used it you noticed it big time. The efficiency jump in particular is astonishing.

michelb 1y ago

I'm excited to see what the newly added matmul accelerators will do to the pro versions of these chips.

megamix 1y ago

Emphasis on "leaked". Or is this just a convenient word to use? How do these things leak? Thanks ! :)

ktosobcy 1y ago

I like the rise of ARM… first AMD and then "PC world" followed suite with Snapdragon. With the latest Elite I think that my next machine (after MPB M1, which is still perfectly fine machine in 2025) will be PC laptop with ~Snapdragon (or something similar) with Linux... I'm fedup with Apples more and more stupid changes and limitations :/ (I actually disabled automatic updates to avoid LiquidTahoe!) For me cool and silent device is more important than raw power, and we are in moment where the CPU is not that important (more so - memory)

chk84us 1y ago
> I actually disabled automatic updates to avoid LiquidTahoe Is there even a way to automatically upgrade to a major macOS version? Automatic update settings are only for minor/patch and security responses.
- wpm 1y ago
  Yeah but even for device administrators using bleeding edge “Declarative Device Management” the “your Mac must be on this version by this time” thing is really hit or miss. I was testing it yesterday just telling a test computer to update to 15.7.1 and while I got nagged to hell, it never actually rebooted to start the update. This is despite claims in each of the nag messages that it would. At least Apple is still somewhat deferential to the user experience.
- ktosobcy 1y ago
  Hmm... that may be true. I just disabled everything in preferences to avoid it completely...
torginus 1y ago
Dunno I remember reading an article about one of the first Snapdragon PCs - they concluded that while the CPU side was pretty good (including, surprisingly availablity of native ARM ports, and x86 emulation), the GPU was far behind typical PC offerings in sophistication, and was unable to run the complex and compute shader heavy workloads required by modern games, shader compilers were buggy, and advanced features were missing or poorly implemented, which made it an expensive word processing machine. I'm not sure if they fixed their newer GPUs but they really ought to.

stakhanov 1y ago

Is the Mac Pro pretty much no longer a thing, going forward? -- Not trying to be a smartass, just asking out of genuine curiosity, because I know next to nothing about the Apple lineup. But the naming ("M2" vs "M5") would seem to suggest it's 3 generations behind the latest?

wlesieutre 1y ago
Yes, it mostly exists for people who absolutely require PCI slots, except you can’t use AMD/Nvidia GPUs anymore so the utility of that is limited. Apple has their “Afterburner” card for ProRes media encoding, you could add even more ports, or there’s probably weird AV interface cards, but the vast majority of people can save a few thousand dollars and get a Mac Studio instead. Since the Mac Studio has more than 10 customers it gets updated more frequently. There were rumors about the Mac Pro getting a higher tier of “we stuck twice as many cores together in the SoC” but it didn’t pan out, likely not worth the development time compared to the higher volume products. But it could hypothetically still happen.
- stakhanov 1y ago
  Thanks!
HSO 1y ago
the next mac pro (presumably next mar/apr) is the first that comes a full 3-year product cycle after ai hype started. therefore I expect that mac pro (and in similar vein mac studio) will be repositioned as ai/ml dev machine, with apple leaning into their lucky strike of UMA fit with modern requirements. my bet is m5 extreme exclusive to mac pro and 1 tb possibly even 2 tb ram, and mac studio limited to m5 ultra and 1 tb ram on the high ends. but thats not based on rumors or "news" of any sort, just from logic extrapolated if i were in apple shoes

ed_blackburn 1y ago

I keep asking, surely, I'm not the only potential customer: where's my ARM 64, Linux Mac mini equivalent? I'd settle for a laptop form if I must.

whynotminot 1y ago
You're not the only one. I think there's 12.
- cdelsolar 1y ago
  There are dozens of us!
  - esjeon 1y ago
    There are several dozens of us!
- ed_blackburn 1y ago
  :-)
theta_d 1y ago
Not the same form factor but here you go: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure
- ed_blackburn 1y ago
  Thank you :-)
Cheer2171 1y ago
The Snapdragon X Elite has tons of laptop models and a few mini PCs like: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-IdeaCentre-Mini-x-debuts-as-new-compact-PC-with-Snapdragon-X-series-CPUs.942252.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-IdeaCentre-Mini-x-debut... The Elite X2 is near release and supposedly on par with these M5 numbers: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M5-9-Cores-Processor-Benchmarks-and-Specs.1128407.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M5-9-Cores-Processor-Ben...

esjeon 1y ago

It's about 10% increase from M4, which is impressive. But, hey, I don't think I'm not even using 10% of the M4 processing power on my iPad. What's the point? Apple seriously need to open up development on/for iPadOS, or it'll become something you by every decade or so. Who needs new model if people can't even utilize what they have right now?