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Apple M5 chip
- SXX 1y ago32GB RAM limit on current M5 models. Now wait for M5 Max.
- bombcar 1y agoM5 Max Macs If they're studios, you can have stacks of M5 Max Macs.
- nik736 1y agoThis is only the base model, no upgrades yet for the Pro/Max version. The memory bandwidth is 153GB/s which is not enough to run viable open source LLM models properly.
- quest88 1y agoWhat do you mean by properly? What’s the behavior one would observe if they did run an llm?
- nik736 1y agoIf you have enough memory to load a model, but not enough bandwidth to handle it, you will get a very low token/s output.
- Rohansi 1y agoYou can also have enough bandwidth but be compute limited and get lower performance than expected. This is more likely to be the case for Apple Silicon vs. high power GPUs.
- burnte 1y ago"Properly" means at some arbitrary speed that the writer would describe as "fast" or "fast enough". If you have a lower demand for speed they'll run fine.
- hu3 1y agoEnough or not, they do describe it like this in an image caption: "M5 is Apple’s next-generation system on a chip built for AI, resulting in a faster, more efficient, and more capable chip for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro."
- mpeg 1y agoThe memory capacity to me is an even bigger problem, at 32GB max.
- sgt 1y agoThat'll come in the MacBook Pro etc cycle, like last time, then you'll have 512GB RAM
- mpeg 1y agoSame with bandwidth though, usually pro/max memory has much higher speed
- andy_ppp 1y agoYes the M4 Base has 120 GB/s, Pro 273 GB/s and Max has 546 GB/s... That means M5 Pro is potentially around 348 GB/s and M5 Max is almost at 700 GB/s - for comparison a 4090 has around 1,000 GB/s. So pretty incredible!
- sgt 1y agoAlso I think even an M3 Ultra is more cost effective at running LLMs than 4090 or 5090. Mostly due to being more energy efficient. And less fragile than running a gamer PC build.
- andy_ppp 1y agoIt can run larger models quite slowly but lacks matmul acceleration (included in the M5) that is very useful for context and prompt performance at inference time. I will probably burn my budget with an M5 Max with 256gb (maybe even 512gb) memory, the price will be upsetting but I guess that is life!
- sgt 1y agoYes! I think smaller models on the M3 Ultra is interesting enough, but now with matmul/ tensors on M5 Ultra or Max, with decent unified mem, it will be a gamechanger. I can easily imagine companies running Mac Studios in prod. Apple should release another Xserve.
- czbond 1y agoI am interested to learn why models move so much data per second. Where could I learn more that is not a ChatGPT session?
- shorts_theory 1y agoYou might be interested in LLM Systems which talks about how LLMs work at the hardware level and what optimizations can be done to improve the efficiency of them in this course: https://llmsystem.github.io/llmsystem2025spring/ https://llmsystem.github.io/llmsystem2025spring/
- modeless 1y agoThe models (weights and activations and caches) can fill all the memory you have and more, and to a first (very rough) approximation every byte needs to be accessed for each token generated. You can see how that would add up. I highly recommend Andrej Karpathy's videos if you want to learn details.
- pfortuny 1y agoA very simplified version is: you need all the matrix to compute a matrix x vector operation, even if the vector is mostly zeroes. Edit: obviously my simplification is wrong but if you add up compression, etc… you get an idea.
- rs186 1y agoWould you mind specifying which video(s)? He has quite a lot of content to consume.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoModels are made of "parameters" which are really weights in a large neural network. For each token generated, each parameter needs to take its turn inside the CPU/GPU to be calculated. So if you have a 7B parameter model with 16-bit quantization, that means you'll have 14 GB/s of data coming in. If you only have 153 GB/sec of memory bandwidth, that means you'll cap out ~11 tokens/sec, regardless of how my processing power you have. You can of course quantize to 8-bit or even 4-bit, or use a smaller model, but doing so makes your model dumber. There's a trade-off between performance and capability.
- wizee 1y ago153 GB/s is not bad at all for a base model; the Nvidia DGX Spark has only 273 GB/s memory bandwidth despite being billed as a desktop "AI supercomputer". Models like Qwen 3 30B-A3B and GPT-OSS 20B, both quite decent, should be able to run at 30+ tokens/sec at typical (4-bit) quantizations.
- zamadatix 1y agoEven at 1.8x the base memory bandwidth and 4x the memory capacity Nvidia spent a lot of time talking about how you can pair two DGXs together with the 200G NIC to be able to slowly run quantized versions of the models everyone was actually interested in. Neither product actually qualifies for the task IMO, and that doesn't change just because two companies advertised them as such instead of just one. The absolute highest end Apple Silicon variants tend to be a bit more reasonable, but the price advantage goes out the window too.
- cma 1y agoM5 says 3X thunderbolt 5, should be able to do 240G bidirectional in total. Not that useful yet with max 32GB of RAM though.
- mrheosuper 1y agomy M1 pro has over 200GB/s ram speed. 5 Years later it's reasonable to expect the base cpu reach that speed.
- diabllicseagull 1y agoYou don’t want to be bandwidth-bound, sure. But it all depends on how much compute power you have to begin with. 153GB/s is probably not enough bandwidth for an Rtx5090. But for the entry laptop/tablet chip M5? It’s likely plenty.
- chedabob 1y agoMy guess would be those are going into the rumoured OLED models coming out next year.
- Tepix 1y agoWith MoE LLMs like Qwen 3 30B-A3B that's no longer true.
- replete 1y agoLooks like the M5 base has LPDDR5x-9600, which works out to 153.6 from base M4's 120GB/s DDR5x-7500. The Pro/Max versions have more memory controllers, 16, 24 and 32 channels accordingly. The 32 channel M5 top-end version will have 614GB/s by my calculations. It would take 48 channels of DDR5x-9600 to match a 3090's memory bandwidth, so the situation is unlikely to change for a couple of years when DDR6 arrives I guess
- heystefan 1y agoIs it me or did they use to avoid calling it "AI"?
- simonw 1y agoYeah, they rebranded it "Apple Intelligence" but this press release appears to be mostly using AI in the same (vague) way that the rest of the industry does. Also just noticed this: "And now with M5, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro and iPad Pro benefit from dramatically accelerated processing for AI-driven workflows, such as running diffusion models in apps like Draw Things, or running large language models locally using platforms like webAI." First time I've ever heard of webAI - I wonder how they got themselves that mention?
- rgo 1y ago> First time I've ever heard of webAI - I wonder how they got themselves that mention? I wondered the same. Went into Crunchbase and found out Crunchbase are now fully paywalled (!), well saw that coming... Anyway, hit the webAI blog, apparently they were showcased at the M4 Macbook Air event in 2024 [1] [2]: > During a demonstration, a 15-inch Air ran a webAI’s 22 billion parameter Companion large language model, rendered a 4K image using the Blender app, opened several productivity apps, and ran the game Wuthering Waves without any kind of slowdown. My guess is this was the best LLM use-case Apple could dig-up for their local-first AI strategy. And Apple Silicon is the best hardware use-case webAI could dig-up for their local-first AI strategy. As for Apple, other examples would look too hacky, purely dev-oriented and depend on LLM behemoths from US or China. Ie "try your brand-new performant M5 chip with LM Studio loaded with China's Deepseek or Meta's Llama" is an Apple exec no-go. 1. https://www.webai.com/blog/why-apples-m4-macbook-air-is-a-milestone-for-on-device-ai https://www.webai.com/blog/why-apples-m4-macbook-air-is-a-mi... 2. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-updates-bestselling-macbook-air-with-m4-chip-enhanced-webcam-140004779.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-updates-bestselling-mac...
- airza 1y agoI get they want to have a lot of their own swift-based bindings but I wish they could also keep their MPS pytorch bindings up to date...
- toddmorey 1y agoThe modern Apple feels like their hardware teams way outperforming the software teams.
- alexanderson 1y agoApple has always been a hardware company first - think of how they sell consumers computers with the OS for free, while Microsoft primarily just sells the OS (when comparing the consumer business; I don’t want to get into all the other stuff Microsoft does). Now that they own the SoC design pipeline, they’re really able to flex these muscles.
- Hamuko 1y agoNot really. Back in the day you wouldn't buy a MacBook because it was powerful. Most likely it had a very shitty Intel CPU with not a lot of cores and with thermal challenges, and the reason you bought it was because macOS.
- alt227 1y ago> very shitty Intel CPU with not a lot of cores and with thermal challenges Very often the intel chips in macbooks were stellar, they were just seriously inhibited by Apples terrible cooling designs and so were permanently throttled. They could never provide decent cooling for the chips coupled with their desire to make paper thin devices.
- scrlk 1y agoThey made things even worse with fan curves tuned for silence until the CPU was practically at TjMax.
- kllrnohj 1y ago> They could never provide decent cooling for the chips coupled with their desire to make paper thin devices. Curiously they managed to figure this out exactly when it became their silicon instead (M1 MacBook Pros were notably thicker and with more cooling capacity than the outgoing Intel ones)
- throwaway48476 1y agoNo M5 mac mini?
- randomtoast 1y agoA unified memory bandwidth of 1,224 gigabits per second is quite impressive.
- vardump 1y agoProbably gigabytes (GB) and not gigabits (Gb)? Edit: gigabits indeed. Confusing, my old M2 Max has 400 GB/s (3200 gigabits per second) bandwidth. I guess it's some sort of baseline figure for the lowest end configuration? Edit 2: 1,224 Gbps equals 153 GB/s. Perhaps M5 Max will have 153 GB/s * 4 = 612 GB/s memory bandwidth. Ultra double that. If anyone knows better, please share.
- mihau 1y agowhy? M3 Ultra already had 800 GB/s (6400 gbps) memory bandwidth
- NetMageSCW 1y agoBut what did the base M3 have? Why compare to different categories? Edit: Apparently 100GB/s, so a 1.5x improvement over the M3 and a 1.25x improvement over the M4. That seems impressive if it scales to Pro, Max and Ultra.
- sapiogram 1y agoAnd that was already impressive. High-end gaming computers with dual-channel DDR5 only reach ~100GB/s of CPU memory bandwidth.
- Aurornis 1y agoHigh end gaming computers have far more memory bandwidth in the GPU, though. The CPU doesn’t need more memory bandwidth for most non-LLM tasks. Especially as gaming computers commonly use AMD chips with giant cache on the CPU. The advantage of the unified architecture is that you can use all of the memory on the GPU. The unified memory architecture wins where your dataset exceeds the size of what you can fit in a GPU, but a high end gaming GPU is far faster if the data fits in VRAM.
- tiahura 1y agoNo 16”?
- adamch 1y agoThey'll announce that along with M5 Pro and Max in March or so.
- littlecranky67 1y agoAnd here I am, selling my Macbook M4 Pro to buy a Macbook Air and a dedicated gaming machine. I've tried gaming on the Macbook with Heroic, GPTK, Whiskey, RPCS3 emu and some native. When a game runs, the performance is stunning for a Laptop - but there is always glitches, bugs and annoyances that take out the joy. Needles to mention lack of support from any sort of online multiplayer, due to the lack of anticheat support. I wish Apple would take gaming more seriously and make GPTK a first class citizen such as Proton on Linux.
- SigmundA 1y agoYep, I use Moonlight / Sunshine / Apollo to stream from my gaming PC, so I still use my Mac setup but get nearly perfect windows gaming with PC elsewhere in house. This has been by far the best setup until Apple can take gaming seriously, which may never happen.
- bamboozled 1y agoSometimes I just feel like buying the latest and greatest game, I have an m4 too, the choices are usually quite abysmal. I agree.
- qnpnp 1y agoMy solution is cloud gaming in that case, such as GeforceNow (for compatible games), or Shadow (for a whole PC to do as you please).
- bamboozled 1y agoThanks, will check it out!
- gjsman-1000 1y agoMany people blame the lack of OpenGL/Vulkan... but I really don't buy it. It doesn't pass the sniff test as an objection. PlayStation doesn't support OpenGL/Vulkan (they have their own proprietary APIs, GNM, GNMX, PSSL). Nintendo supports Vulkan but performance is so bad, almost everyone uses the proprietary API (NVN / NVN2). Xbox obviously doesn't accept OpenGL/Vulkan either, requiring DirectX. Understanding of Metal is widespread in mobile gaming, so it's weird AAA couldn't pull from that industry if they wished.
- jasoneckert 1y agoWith the same number and types (P/E) of cores, the M5 seems more like a feature refinement over M4. I wonder if this is a CPU that Apple released primarily for AI marketing purposes and perception, rather than to push the envelope.
- willahmad 1y agoAre we going to see SOTA local coding models anytime soon with this hardware or is it still long way to go?
- Etheryte 1y agoYou can already do that, just how slow or fast you go depends on how much you're ready to pay for memory. It's a $1200 premium to go from 36GB to 128GB of unified memory, that cost is hard to justify unless you really need it, or if someone else is paying.
- willahmad 1y agoNone is comparable to GPT-5 or Sonnet 4.5 experience
- mertbio 1y agoYet.
- elzbardico 1y agoFrankly, right now I am way more satisfied with qwen-3-coder-420 using Cerebras inference than with those more powerful models. Inference speed and fast feedback matter a lot more than perfect generation to me.
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoI appreciate Apple propping up the GPU performance of their SoC but it feels a bit pointless when all the libraries they provide are so insular and disconnected from the rest of the industry. I personally wish they would learn from the failure of Metal. Also unleashes? Really? The marketing madness has to stop at some point.
- mcv 1y agoSoon they'll be stomping all over your calculation problems, and then obliterating them!
- dralley 1y agoNot that I've actually used any of these APIs, but supposedly Metal is the best designed Graphics API by a decent margin, it's just handicapped severely by how insular they and their ecosystem are.
- bigyabai 1y agoDepends on what you're comparing to. Many people will point to OpenGL and Vulkan as comparisons, which is fair. But those are just the Open Source alternatives, and Metal itself is a proprietary solution competing against other well-designed alternatives like DirectX and NVN. I think Metal's ergonomics advantage is a much slimmer lead when you consider the other high-level APIs it competes with.
- Cloudef 1y ago> Metal is the best designed Graphics API API that has dependency on objective-c runtime doesn't sound very good
- thurn 1y agoNo "max" or "pro" equivalent? I wanted to get a new Macbook Pro, but there's no obvious successor to the M4 Max available, M5 looks like a step down in performance if anything.
- infecto 1y agoI assume that would come with the next release cycle of the MacBook? Isn’t that supposed to be early next year?
- nocoiner 1y agoApparently not until early next year. I was surprised by this too, but I hadn’t really been following the rumors at all, so I didn’t really have any grounds for being surprised by this.
- ytch 1y agothey usually release Pro or Max model later: M4: May 2024 M4 pro/max: Oct 2024 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/05/apple-introduces-m4-chip/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/05/apple-introduces-m4-c... https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-introduces-m4-pro-and-m4-max/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-introduces-m4-p...
- nsteel 1y agoM3: same time https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/10/apple-unveils-m3-m3-pro-and-m3-max-the-most-advanced-chips-for-a-personal-computer/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/10/apple-unveils-m3-m3-p... M2: June 2022 M2 pro/max: Jan 2023 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with-breakthrough-performance-and-capabilities/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with... https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-unveils-m2-pro-and-m2-max-next-generation-chips-for-next-level-workflows/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-unveils-m2-pro-...
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- jmull 1y ago
- benjaminclauss 1y agoDespite the flak Apple gets, there M-series continues to impress me as I learn more about hardware.
- vardump 1y agoI guess I'm waiting for the M5 Max chip. Hopefully it's configurable with 256 GB RAM for LLMs and some VMs.
- mumber_typhoon 1y agoThe M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the M5 iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet). All in all, apple is doing some incredible things with hardware. Software teams at apple really need to get their act together. The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things most people do on their computers. Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same tasks ive been last couple of years. I really hope this is not intentional from Apple to make me upgrade. That would be a big let down.
- imcritic 1y ago[flagged]
- alimbada 1y agoI've been using an iPhone 11 for 4 years now (also, reminder: the 11 was launched 2 years prior to when I bought mine). I replaced the battery earlier this year as it wouldn't last to the end of the day any more but besides that it's showing no slowdowns or any other issues.
- bombcar 1y agoDo you have iOS 26 on it? That pigdog is making my 15 Pro Max sweat and cry.
- jadbox 1y ago... no benchmarks?
- nake13 1y agoIt seems this generation focuses more on GPU and AI acceleration rather than CPU. The M5 chip allows Apple Vision Pro to render 10% more pixels and operate at up to 120 Hz. It delivers up to four times the peak GPU compute performance compared with M4, provides 30% higher graphics performance, and offers 15% faster multithreaded CPU performance.
- Noaidi 1y agoI am wondering if Apple's focus is off lately with this drive for AI. So far all they are showing in that presentation is that I can have "the ability to transform 2D photos into spatial scenes in the Photos app, or generating a Persona — operate with greater speed and efficiency." And by making Apple AI (which is something I do not use for many reasons, but mainly because of Climate Change) their focus, I am afraid they are losing and making their operating Systems worse. For instance, Liquid Glass, the mess I was lucky enough to uninstall before they put in the embargo against doing so, is, well, a mess. An Aplha release in my opinion which I feel was a distraction from their lack of a robust AI release. So by blowing money on the AI gold rush that they were too late for, will they ultimately ruin their products across the board? I am currently attempting to sell my iPhone 16E and my M1 Macbook Air to move back to Linux because of all of this.
- Tagbert 1y agoMost of the AI and Machine Learning Apple has done so far are primarily done on device so you can see whether there is any climate change concern or not.
- steinvakt2 1y agoIf you don’t use AI for climate reasons then you should read the recent reports about how little electricity and water is actually used. It’s basically zero (image and video models excluded). Your information about this is probably related to GPT3.5 or something. Which is now 3 years old - a lifetime in AI world.
- wat10000 1y agoDon't newer models use more energy? I thought they were getting bigger and more computationally intensive.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoThey use a massive amount of energy during training. During inference they use a tiny amount of energy, less than a web search (turns out you can be really efficient if you don't mind giving wrong answers at random, and can therefore skip expensive database queries!)
- GaggiX 1y ago>The 10-core GPU features a dedicated Neural Accelerator in each core "The neural engine features a graphic accelerator" probably M6
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- h1fra 1y agoI keep seeing all those crazy screenshots from games on Mac, and yet there are barely any big releases for this platform. I guess it benefits a whole range of software, not just games, but still that's a pity.
- tantalor 1y agoBecause gaming on Mac actually looks bad in practice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906305
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- gmm1990 1y agoInteresting that there's only the m5 on the macbook pro. I thought the m4 and m4 pro/max were at the same time on the macbook pro
- jbjbjbjb 1y agoI’m glad I opted to get the base model M4 Mac Mini rather than upgrade the memory for longevity.
- mohsen1 1y agoFirst time seeing Apple using "AI" in their marketing material. It was "Machine Learning" and "Apple Intelligence" before...
- mentalgear 1y agoUnfortunately, they have also succumbed to the AI hype machine. Apple, calling it by its actual name "machine learning" was about the only thing I still liked about Apple.
- rpdillon 1y agoWait, didn't they try to backronym their way into "Apple Intelligence" last cycle? https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
- kryllic 1y agoProbably don't want to draw more attention to their ongoing lawsuits [1]. Apple, for all its faults, does enjoy consistency and the unruly nature of LLM's is something I'm shocked they thought they could tame in a short amount of time. The fallout of the hilariously bad news/message "summaries" were more than enough to spook Apple from allowing that to go much further. >Built into your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro* to help you write, express yourself, and get things done effortlessly.** Designed with groundbreaking privacy at every step. The asterisks are really icing on the cake here. --- [1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-accused-of-ai-copyright-infringement-by-suny-professors https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-accused-of-ai-cop...
- kgwgk 1y ago> actual name "machine learning" Yesterday’s hype is today’s humility.
- adastra22 1y agoMachine learning is a bit more specific than what we now call AI, no?
- lenerdenator 1y agoNow if some game companies would just port their wares to Apple Silicon and the MacOS libraries already...
- zoobab 1y agoDoes it run Linux?
- amlib 1y agoIt doesn't also run Crysis, and if was left for apple to decide it wouldn't even run DOOM.
- sameermanek 1y agoDid anyone else notice that the base storage has been upgraded to 512G? I knew this was coming after iPhone 17s storage upgrade!
- xd1936 1y ago512GB was the base storage of the M4 also. https://web.archive.org/web/20251010205008/https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro https://web.archive.org/web/20251010205008/https://www.apple...
- badc0ffee 1y agoIt was 256 GB on the first M4s
- criddell 1y agoLooks like the base storage on the iPad Pro is still 256 GB.
- Tepix 1y agoThis is the Macbook Pro, not the Macbook Air.
- gzer0 1y agoM5 Chip currently only avaialble with up to 32 GB of RAM on the 14 inch Macbook pro variant, just FYI. [1] https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-m5 https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inc...
- pixelpoet 1y agoThat's laughable in 2025, and together with the wimpy 153 GB/s memory bandwidth (come on, Strix Halo is 256GB/s at a fraction of the price!) they really don't have a leg to stand on calling this AI-anything!
- hannesfur 1y agoAs pointed out in other places as well a better comparison will be the upcoming Pro & Max variants. Also, as far as I know, Strix Halo mainly uses the GPU for inference not the little AI accelerator AMD has put on there. That one is just to limited.
- Tepix 1y agoSo you're saying these won't sell at all?
- pixelpoet 1y agoI'm saying this is pretty weaksauce for AI-anything in 2025, especially considering the price tag. Sure, there will be later models with more memory and bandwidth (no doubt at eye-watering prices), but with 32 GB this model isn't it. I'm sure it's a perfectly fine daily driver, but you have to appreciate the irony of a massive chip loaded to the gills with matrix multiplication units, marketed as an amazing AI machine, and yet so hobbled by mem capacity and bandwidth.
- jon-wood 1y ago> Apple 2030 is the company’s ambitious plan to be carbon neutral across its entire footprint by the end of this decade by reducing product emissions from their three biggest sources: materials, electricity, and transportation. But never, ever, through not shipping incremental hardware bumps every year regardless of whether there's anything really worth shipping.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI'm always skeptical about these carbon neutral pledges because in practice it's a lot of administrative magic, like paying a company that says they will plant trees or whatever which will sign some official looking paper saying 'ye apple totaly compensated three morbillion tonnes of carbon emissions'. And it's things like not including a charger, cable, headphones anymore to reduce package size, which sure, will save a little on emissions but it's moot because people will still need those things.
- asdhtjkujh 1y agoVery few people are buying a new machine every year, even when the updates (like this year) are arguably more than incremental — selling outdated hardware that will become obsolete sooner is not more environmentally-friendly. Hardware longevity and quality are probably the least valid criticisms of the current Macbook lineup. Most of the industry produces future landfill at an alarming rate.
- SG- 1y agosecond hand Apple market is very big, especially since M series MacBooks leapfrogged performance.
- nozzlegear 1y agoSurely people just won't buy it if it's not worth shipping?
- sings_lullabies 1y ago[dead]
- sebastianconcpt 1y agoWonder how it compares with the M4 Max that I've just bought haha
- dmix 1y agoSame I just bought an M4 Max 2 weeks ago and had a bit of anxiety for a moment. I'm going to justify it because they haven't released M5 Max yet
- sebastianconcpt 1y agoIt's going to be fine, what's important is what we do with the thingy :) Logos is King
- whitepoplar 1y agoAny word on whether this chip has "Memory Integrity Enforcement" capability, as included in Apple's A19/A19 Pro chips? https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/ https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...
- SG- 1y agoit's the same core, so more than likely yes.
- gcr 1y agoSo how many hardware systems does Apple silicon have for doing matrix multiplies now? 1. CPU, via SIMD/NEON instructions (just dot products) 2. CPU, via AMX coprocessor (entire matrix multiplies, M1-M3) 3. CPU, via SME (M4) 4. GPU, via Metal (compute shaders + simdgroup-matrix + mps matrix kernels) 4. Neural Engine via CoreML (advisory) Apple also appears to be adding a “Neural Accelerator” to each core on the M5?
- hannesfur 1y agoI inferred that they meant the neural engine cores by neural accelerators or it could be a bigger/different AMX (which really should become a standard btw)
- oskarkk 1y agoWould it be possible to use all of them at the same time? Not necessarily in a practical way, but just for fun? Could different ways of doing this on CPU be done in some extent by one core at the same time, given it's superscalar?
- staticfloat 1y agoThis is a very old answer about the M1, but yes what you’re saying is possible: https://stackoverflow.com/a/67590869/230778 https://stackoverflow.com/a/67590869/230778
- nullbyte 1y agoThankfully I think libraries like Pytorch abstract this stuff away. But it seems very convoluted if you're building something from the ground up.
- gardnr 1y agoDoes PyTorch support other acceleration? I thought they just support Metal.
- joshuabaker2 1y ago
- hannesfur 1y agoIt’s unfortunate that this announcement is still unspecific about what they improved in the Neural Engine. Since all we know about the Neural Engine comes from Apple papers or reverse engineering efforts (https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine), it’s plausible that they addressed some quirks to enable better transformer performance. They have written quite interesting papers on transformers on the Neural Engine: - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-transformers https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra... - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/vision-transformers https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/vision-transforme... Things have definitely gotten better with MLX on the software side, though it still seems they could do more in that area (let’s see what the M5 Max brings). But even if they made big strides here, it won’t help previous generations, and the main thing limiting Apple Intelligence (in my opinion) will continue to be the 8 GB of unified memory they still insist on.
- fooblaster 1y agoMLX doesn't use the neural engine still right? I still wish they would abandon that unit and just center everything around metal and tensor units on the GPU.
- zozbot234 1y agoWrt. language models/transformers, the neural engine/NPU is still potentially useful for the pre-processing step, which is generally compute-limited. For token generation you need memory bandwidth so GPU compute with neural/tensor accelerators is preferable.
- fooblaster 1y agoI think I'd still rather have the hardware area put into tensor cores for the GPU instead of this unit that's only programmable with onnx.
- hannesfur 1y agoOh, I overlooked that! You are right. Surprising… since Apple has shown that it’s possible through CoreML (https://github.com/apple/ml-ane-transformers https://github.com/apple/ml-ane-transformers) I would hope that the Foundation Models (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels) use the neural engine.
- jdlyga 1y agoIf only the Windows ecosystem could make the processor transition as smooth as Mac.
- lostmsu 1y agoI don't think it is the ecosystem. The ARM CPUs not from Apple are just too slow.
- kotaKat 1y agoSurprised they aren’t beating the “performance per watt” drum they normally would be on Mx releases. I’m assuming this will be a bit of a snoozer until the M5X/M5 Ultra or an M6 hits the pipeline. If anything, these refreshes let them get rid of the last old crap on the line for M1 and M2, tie up loose ends with Walmart for the $599 M1 Air they still make for ‘em, and start shipping out the A18 Pro-based Macbooks in November.
- ajross 1y agoThey don't have a new process to launch on, so one wouldn't expect a power metric to improve at all.
- sbbq 1y agoThe chips are great. Now they just need to improve the quite stagnant laptop hardware to go with it.
- alberth 1y agoVision Pro went from M2 to M5, that's quite a jump in horse-power.
- adamschwartz 1y agoAlso ~200g heavier due in part to the counterweight in the new strap.
- cagenut 1y agohmmm thats 200g in the wrong direction
- outcoldman 1y agoMarketing: M5 announcement [1] says 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI compared to M4. I guess in the lab? Both iPad and MBP M5 [2][3] say "delivering up to 3.5x the AI performance". But all the examples of AI (in [3]), they are 1.2-2.3X faster than M4. So where this 3.5X is coming from? What tests did Apple do to show that? --- 1. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unleashes-m5-the-next-big-leap-in-ai-performance-for-apple-silicon/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unleashes-m5-th... 2. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-inch-macbook-pro-powered-by-the-m5-chip/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-... 3. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-introduces-the-powerful-new-ipad-pro-with-the-m5-chip/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-introduces-the-...
- relativeadv 1y agoIts not uncommon for Apple and others to compare against two generations ago rather than the immediately preceding one
- outcoldman 1y agoI referenced everything about comparing to M4. I left outside the comparison with M1.
- storus 1y agoM5 is supposed to support FP4 natively which would explain the speed up on Q4 quantized models (down from BF16).
- exabrial 1y ago> A nearly 30 percent increase in unified memory bandwidth to 153GB/s I'll believe the benchmarks, not marketing claims, but an observation and a question. 1. AMD EPYC 4585PX has ~89GB/s, with pretty good latency, as long you use 2xdimm 2. How does this compare to the memory bandwidth and latency of M1,M2,M3,M4 in reality with all of the caveats? It seems like M1 was a monumental leap forward, then everything else was a retraction.
- andrewmcwatters 1y ago[dead]
- mkirsten 1y agoWhy retraction?
- exabrial 1y agoApple's software division has lost their way. They've done nothing but add flashy features and move buttons around, deprecating things and breaking backwards compatibility (yeah, 32bit has been awhile now, but alas), meanwhile retreating on stability. Snow Leopard still remains the company's crown achievement. 0 bloatware, 0 "mobile features on desktop" (wtf is this even a thing?), tuned for absolute speed and stability.
- raw_anon_1111 1y agoThey completely removed hardware support for 32 bit software.
- morshu9001 1y agoThis was in the Intel generation of Macs. If Windows can support 32-bit software then so should Mac, along with all that 64-bit software that got broken in random Mac updates. Ironically I can still run old 32-bit Windows software in Wine on my M1 Mac. Windows software is more stable on a Mac than Mac software.
- raw_anon_1111 1y agoDo you think they didn’t know they were moving away from Intel when they did that? Besides code is shared between MacOS and iOS even then. They removed 32 bit support from ARM processors years before they moved to ARM based Macs.
- morshu9001 1y agoThey probably did, but just because M1 gets released doesn't mean Intel Macs suddenly don't have 32-bit capable hardware. I get why it was easier to drop it in the new OS regardless of hardware, only it throws a lot of software under the bus, and running software is kinda the OS's main job. And the hardware isn't a showstopper anyway. Apple did x86-64 on AS, Windows' WoW64 does x86-32 on ARM-32 or even IA-64, and I'll bet Windows will do x86-32 on x86-64 if Intel ever drops the 32 mode. Wine 32on64 will run x86-32 on AS already.
- yalogin 1y agoIt feels like apple is “ a square peg in a round hole” when it comes to AI - atleast for now. They are not the hardware provider like nvidia, they don’t do the software and services like OpenAI or even Microsoft/oracle. So they are struggling to find a foothold here. I am sure they are working on a lot of things but the only way to showcase them is through their phone which ironically enough feels like not the best path for apple. Apple’s best option is to put llms locally on the phone and claim privacy (which is true) but they may end up in the same Siri vs others situation, where Siri always is the dumber one. This is interesting to see how it plays out
- mirekrusin 1y agoBeing late in AI race or not entering it from training side is not necessarily bad, others have burned tons of money, if Apple enters with their hardware first (only?) it may disrupt status quo from consumer side. It's not impossible that they'll produce hardware everybody will want to run local models that will be on par with closed ones. If this happens it may change real money flow (as opposed to investor based on imaginary evaluation money that can evaporate).
- bob1029 1y ago> Being late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Second-mover_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Second-m...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mft_ 1y agoThey are the leader in manufacturing consumer systems with sufficient high-bandwidth memory to enable decent-sized LLMs to be run locally with reasonable performance. If you want to run something that needs >=32GB of memory (which is frankly bottom-end for a somewhat capable LLM) they're your only widely-available choice (otherwise you've got the rare Strix Halo AI Max+ 395 chip, or you need multiple GPUs, or maybe a self-build based around a Threadripper.) This might not be widely recognised, as the proportion of people wanting to run capable LLMs locally is likely a rounding error versus the people who use ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini regularly. It's also not something that Apple market on, as they can't monetize it. However, as time goes on and memory and compute power gradually decrease in price, and also maybe as local LLMs continue to increase in ability (?) it may become more and more relevant.
- bfrog 1y agoThe big win would be a linux capable device. I don't have any interest in mac os x but the apple m parts always seem amazing. In theory this would be where qualcomm would come in and provide something but in practice they seem to be stuck in qualcomm land where only lawyers matter and actual users and developers can get stuffed.
- cogman10 1y agoYeah, this is the biggest hole in ARM offerings. The only well supported devices are either phones or servers with very little in between. Even common consumer devices like wifi routers will have ARM SOCs with pinned version of the kernel they are attached to which will get supported for 1 to 2 years at most.
- mrkeen 1y agoI have a pretty good time on Asahi Fedora (macbook air M1). It supposedly also supports M2 but no higher. And it's a PITA to install (needs to be started within macosx, using scripts, with the partitions already in a good state)
- Gethsemane 1y agoIf I was less lazy I could probably find this answer online, but how do you find the battery life these days? I'd love to make the switch, but that's the only thing holding me back...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoHow's Thunderbolt and display port alt mode?
- neobrain 1y agoActively in progress, with related patches submitted to the kernel mailing list as recently as 3 days ago.
- mysteria 1y agoThe issue is that it's hacky, and in that case I'd rather go with a Intel or AMD x86 system with more or less out of the box Linux support. What we're looking for is a performant ARM system where Linux is a first class citizen.
- 6stringmerc 1y ago[flagged]
- mittermayr 1y agoThis morning I was looking to maybe replace my Macbook Pro 2018, which had the horrible keyboard and finally seems to be crippled enough to not be fun to use anymore — now this! However, I have been disappointed by Apple too many times (they wouldn't replace my keyboard despite their highly-flamed design-faux-pas, had to replace the battery twice by now, etc.) Two years ago I finally stopped replacing their expensive external keyboards, which I used to buy once a year or every other (due to broken key-hinges) and have been so incredibly positively surprised by getting used to the MX Keys now. Much better built, incredible mileage for the price. Plus, I can easily switch and use them on my Windows PC, too. So, about the Macbook — if I were to switch mobile computing over to Windows, what can I replace it with? My main machine is still a Mac Mini M2 Pro, which is perfect value/price. I like the Surface as a concept (replacable keyboards are a fantastic idea, battery however, super iffy nonsense), and I've got a Surface Pro 6 around, but it's essentially the same gloss-premium I don't need for my use. Are there any much-cheaper but somewhat comparable laptops (12h+ battery, 1 TB disk, 16-32GB RAM, 2k+ Display) with reasonable build quality? Does bypassing the inherent premium of all the Apple gloss open up any useful options? Or is Apple actually providing the best value here? Would love to hear from non-Surface, non-Thinkpad (I love it, but) folks who've got some recommendations for sub $1k laptops. Not my main machine, but something I take along train rides, or when going to clients, or sometimes working offsite for a day.
- vachina 1y agoLG Gram SuperSlim. Very light (900grams). I once went hiking with it and forgot the laptop was still in the bag. But its really only capable of high performance in short bursts because of the extremely small thermal mass.
- mittermayr 1y agothanks for the hint, spec-wise, this is exactly what I meant, 1tb ssd, 16gb ram, 16 hours of battery, very nice. then I saw it's 1700 EUR where I am at the moment, so pretty much Macbook Pro price :(
- 1y ago
- alberth 1y agoApple is binning the iPad Pro chips: Storage CPU ≤ 512GB 3 P-cores (and 6 E-cores) 1TB+ 4 P-cores (and 6 E-cores) https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/
- xangel 1y ago[flagged]
- tempaccount420 1y agoStorage-gating is really disgusting considering how much Apple charges for storage.
- aloer 1y agoiirc in the past it was about memory and that larger storage needs more memory for caching. So this made at least some sense. I guess yields might be good enough that they can afford to bin with another core in there as well. Memory is probably still the main reason for binning in the first place.
- alberth 1y agoMy guess is that the lower-tier storage iPad Pro's are getting the "defective" MacBook Pro chips.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoI figure it's probably just reducing SKUs. The people who care about the fastest chip are likely also the people wanting lots of storage so you can save on having to create a ton more products by bundling them.
- Schiendelman 1y agoStill? They really don't overcharge. The storage they sell is much, much, much faster than what everyone compares it to at lower prices.
- criddell 1y agoI wish I could get the nano texture glass on a lower spec iPad Pro. I probably only need the 512 GB model and the glass is only available on 1 and 2 TB modes.
- nblgbg 1y ago32GB is the maximum memory configuration for the 14-inch laptop, which isn’t sufficient for running local LLMs. I think a Mac Studio or Mac Mini with higher memory would be more useful.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- reacharavindh 1y agoOne that’s be a nice quality of life improvement in MacBook(Air/Pro) is built-in 5G connectivity. I’d spring for that convenience not needing to connect to a hotspot draining precious battery on my phone. I thought we were closer given Apple started making their own modems, but it is still a miss.
- port3000 1y agoThey want you to buy the Apple phone and pair it, so they sell more
- tim333 1y agoYou used to be able to get a sim thing in IBM thinkpads but it didn't sell well. I think people don't want two data contracts. It might be better now with esims and stuff though.
- aurareturn 1y agoYou can pair an Android phone with a Mac. Why do they need an Apple phone?
- pier25 1y agoDoes the M5 feature the UltraFusion connector which would enable the Ultra variant?
- dmitshur 1y agoThe claimed 1.6x increase in video game frame rate compared to M4 seems pretty good. Looking forward to seeing it tested out in practice.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Insanity 1y agoAssume they released this ahead of their end of month event in response to all the leaks from the past weeks.
- superkuh 1y agoI know it's only shared system RAM and not VRAM, but the M5's 150GB/s isn't going to be very fast when doing AI inference. A fairly old rtx 3060 12GB does 360GB/s. But I guess quantity is a quality all of it's own when it comes to RAM and inference.
- sidcool 1y agoI wonder if they informed Jensen about it.
- davidw 1y agoAre we headed back to the bad old days of very proprietary systems, where megacorps dictate everything?
- GeekyBear 1y agoI'd argue that calling the new matrix multiplication unit they added to the GPU cores a neural engine instead of a tensor processing unit is a branding error that will lead to confusion. The existing neural engine's function is to maximize power efficiency, not flexible performance on models of any size.
- bigyabai 1y agoI'd argue that Apple's definition of "neural engine" was entirely different from what the greater desktop, edge and datacenter markets already considered a "neural engine" to be. It's an improvement, nomenclature-wise.
- ThrowawayR2 1y agoA computing device named M5 with highly advanced AI capabilities meant for enterprise (or Enterprise) computing environments? Uh-oh, I think I'll pass; I saw this episode of Star Trek (TOS: The Ultimate Computer) before. Hope the owner's manual comes with a warning not to wear a red shirt anywhere near it, dohohoho. (Perhaps it would be safer to wait for The Next Generation?)
- drtiberius 1y agoThe M5 Multitronic Unit is now in charge of the military, Captain Dunsel. We are doomed
- ironman1478 1y agoIt's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-like in that there isn't very much variation in hardware, as opposed to traditional PC gaming. I would think that it's easier to develop a game for a MacBook than a Windows machine where you never know what hardware setup the user will have.
- LtdJorge 1y agoMetal is a very recent API compared to DirectX and OpenGL. Also, there’s very very little people on Mac, and even less that also play videogames. There are almost no libraries and tooling built around Metal and the Mac SDKs, and a very small audience, so it doesn’t make financial sense.
- sosodev 1y agoIt's easier to develop a game for a mac in some ways but you reach a tiny fraction of gamers that way.
- hangonhn 1y agoI wonder how that might look once you factor in Apple TV devices. They're pretty weak devices now but future ones can come with M-class CPUs. That's a huge source of potential revenue for Apple.
- amluto 1y agoThe current Apple TV is, in many respects, unbelievably bad, and it has nothing to do with the CPU. Open up the YouTube app and try to navigate the UI. It’s okay but not really up to the Apple standard. Now try to enter text in the search bar. A nearby iPhone will helpfully offer to let you use it like a keyboard. You get a text field, and you can type, and keystrokes are slowly and not entirely reliably propagated to the TV, but text does not stay in sync. And after a few seconds, in the middle of typing, the TV will decide you’re done typing and move focus to a search result, and the phone won’t notice, and it gets completely desynchronized.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jdc0589 1y agothis is cool and all, but what im really exited about is the possibility that one day they update their laptops so the keys stop leaving marks on the screen. I know we are a few major scientific breakthroughs away from that even being remotely possible, but it sure would be nice.
- maxk42 1y agoFor my use case I need MSL to support fp64. Until that happens I don't care what hardware changes they make: I'm not going to be filling racks with M5s and they're not producing something I can use to even tinker with AI with in my spare time. Apple has lost the AI war before it even got started IMO.
- mrbonner 1y agoI'm waiting for the day when the iphone would be equipped with an M chip. Maybe not long of a wait I hope.
- paxys 1y agoM5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4, which was 5x more powerful than M3, which was 4x more powerful than M2, which was 4x more powerful than M1, which itself was 6x faster than an equivalent Intel processor. Great! Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago. So, where is the disconnect here? Why is actual user experience not able to keep up with benchmarks and marketing?
- tylerhou 1y ago> M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4 In GPU performance (probably measured on a specific set of tasks).
- vintagedave 1y agoWhat scares me is that my M2 started seeing performance issues in macOS recently. Safari is sometimes slow (I admit I stress it with many tabs, but it wasn't like this a year ago.) Somehow the graphics in general seems slower on Tahoe, eg the effects when minimising a window. I am deeply concerned all the performance benefits of the new chips will get eaten away.
- conradev 1y agoThat is certainly inevitable, it's just a question of when: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- MobiusHorizons 1y agoYou are probably actually witnessing the reduction in performance of swap as your drive fills up. Check the memory pressure in activity manager. The fix is pretty easy (delete stuff).
- vintagedave 1y agoThanks, but I have over a hundred gig free. And I got the max RAM I could (24GB.) I feel like the machine _should_ be capable in 2025.
- pzo 1y agoThis is quite weird move and confusing (probably on purpose). This chip M5 is released in Macbook PRO but previous macbook pro had M4 Pro or M4 Max so their more like macbook air series to even like ipad pro series. They say "M5 offers unified memory bandwidth of 153GB/s, providing a nearly 30 percent increase over M4" but my old Macbook M2 Max have 400GB/s
- rcarmo 1y agoI'll take one inside an iPad mini, thank you very much.
- mattray0295 1y agoThey push these new generations out so quick, and with crazy performance boosts. Impressive
- elric 1y agoMeanwhile intel seems to be doing a big bunch of nothing much. And AMD seems busy playing house with OpenAI to catch up to nvidia on the GPU front. Now if only Apple would sell these for use outside of their walled garden.
- mrlonglong 1y agoGood old Brits, taking over the world with an ISA extraordinarily efficient that at inception they discovered that the processor still kept operating by sucking voltage from leakage currents even though the power was off. From: https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech... "> The power test tools they were using were unreliable and approximate, but good enough to ensure this rule of thumb power requirement. When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time. > Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever. > As Wilson tells it: “The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident." > Wilson had, it turned out, designed a powerful 32-bit processor that consumed no more than a tenth of a Watt."
- looneysquash 1y agoThats cool, but so much software only supports CUDA.
- busymom0 1y ago> M5 brings its industry-leading power-efficient performance to the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro Not for Mac mini?
- supernes 1y agoThey'll put it in the Mini when they push out a new Studio to upsell to.
- junglistguy 1y ago[dead]
- allenrb 1y agoI’d like a filter to remove all mention of AI and associated performance from copy like this. Maybe I can build it with… nvm. Seriously, can’t you tell me about the CPU cores and their performance?
- wina 1y agowhy do you want more CPU cores and better performance than the M4, if not for running local AI models?
- adastra22 1y agoCOU cores aren’t relevant to running AI?
- sib 1y agoPhoto & video post-processing...
- Remnant44 1y agoEssentially ever other use case for a computer. Whether you're playing games, or editing videos, or doing 3D work, or trying to digest the latest bloated react mess on some website.. ;)
- allenrb 1y agoI… think you’re joking, but I can’t be sure.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- LarsDu88 1y agoIt's disappointing to me how far behind other chipmakers are in having unified gpu/cpu memory bus. Only AMD Strix Halo even attempts this. Well this announcement tipped my hand and I'm finally buying a new macbook :)
- jhart 1y ago[dead]
- hereme888 1y agoBase models only: - M1 | 5 nm | 8 (4P+4E) | GPU 7–8 | 16-core Neural | Memory Bandwidth: 68.25 GB/s | Unified Memory: 16 GB | Geekbench6 ~2346 / 8346 - M2 | 5 nm (G2) | 8 (4P+4E) | GPU 8–10 | 16-core Neural | Memory Bandwidth: 100 GB/s | Unified Memory: 24 GB | Geekbench6 ~2586 / 9672 - M3 | 3 nm (first-gen) | 8 (4P+4E) | GPU 8–10 | 16-core Neural | Memory Bandwidth: 100 GB/s | Unified Memory: 24 GB | Geekbench6 ~2965 / 11565 - M4 | 3 nm (second-gen) | 10 (4P+6E) | GPU 8–10 | 16-core Neural | Memory Bandwidth: 120 GB/s | Unified Memory: 32 GB | Geekbench6 ~3822 / 15031 - M5 | 3 nm (third-gen) | 10 (4P+6E) | GPU 10 | 16-core Neural | Memory Bandwidth: 153 GB/s | Unified Memory: up to 32 GB | Geekbench6 ~4133 / 15,437 (9-core sample)
- gigatexal 1y agoAmazing. My M3Max is going to look like a paper-weight very soon. And that's fine by me. When I get an M6 or M7Max to replace it it'll be amazing.
- bombcar 1y agoI’m trying to find any reason I can that my M1 Max needs replacement; it’s hard. How do you justify it?
- alexeldeib 1y agoFun one: https://incident.io/blog/festive-macbooks https://incident.io/blog/festive-macbooks
- nu11ptr 1y agoI am in the same boat as my Rust compile times are solid. I'm good for now, but with the M4 max twice as fast, upgrading to the M5 max next year could be a tempting upgrade.
- djtriptych 1y ago
- t1234s 1y agoAny reason they don't have an apple TV pro with an M* chip that's targeted towards gaming?
- quentindanjou 1y agoI think it is because there are not enough games to be the reason for integrating an M* chip.
- boogieknite 1y agoprobably right but on the other hand Apple is willing to throw mountains of $ at tv+ productions just to get ppl on their platform an economist could probably tell me why portioning some of that money to spend on game port budget isnt valuable. gamepass seems ripe to be undercut too
- NetMageSCW 1y agoBecause the A* iPhone chip in the Apple TV should be more than enough for HD quality gaming?
- textlapse 1y agoI wonder how much of the nVidia DGX Spark announcement was meant to precede this M5 announcement by a day or two; M5 MBP has higher performance with a monitor attached and with a (bit) lower price tag. If you could yank the screen out, it probably evens out :) I have seen quite a few such announcements from competitors that tend to be so close that I wonder if they have some competitor analysis to precede the Goliath by a few days (like Google vs rest, Apple vs rest etc).
- ChuckMcM 1y agoI think it would be amazing to be able to buy an M5 based open platform.
- mgaunard 1y agowhy is Apple focusing on AI? do they have any AI products like Google, Meta or OpenAI?
- drnick1 1y agoA lot of Apple hardware is impressive on paper, but I will never buy a Mac that can't run Linux. I simply don't want to live in Apple's walled garden. Then there is the whole ARM vs x86 issue. Even if a compatible Linux distro were made, I expect to run all kinds of software on my desktop rig including games, and ARM is still a dead end for that. For laptops, it's probably a sensible choice now, but we're still far from truly free and usable ARM desktop.
- geek_at 1y agoI'm still looking for a decent ARM laptop that runs linux well. I have my eye on one from lenovo but linux support is still not the best
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- littlecranky67 1y ago> A lot of Apple hardware is impressive on paper, but I will never buy a Mac that can't run Linux. They run Linux actually very well, have you ever tried Parallels or VMware Fusion? Especially Parallels ships with good softwaer drivers for 2d/3d/video acceleration, suspend, and integration into the host OS. If that is not your thing, the new native container solution in Tahoe can run container from dockerhub and co. > I simply don't want to live in Apple's walled garden. And what walled garden would that be on macOS? You can install what you want, and there is homebrew at your fingertips with all the open and non-open software you can ask for.
- imoverclocked 1y ago... or UTM. I have run windows and Linux on my M1 MB Pro with plenty of success. Windows - because I needed it for a single application. Linux - has been extremely useful as a compliment to small arm SBCs that I run. eg: Compiling a kernel is much faster there than on (say) a Raspberry Pi. Also, USB device sharing makes working with vfat/ext4 filesystems on small memory cards a breeze.
- anteloper 1y agoI can't find a single moore's law chart that includes 2025 data (they all seem to cut off around 2020 actually). Does anyone know if we're still on pace with Moore's law?
- tim333 1y agoThings seem to have slacked off a bit on the transistors per chip thing. Eg M1 16 billion transistors M5 28 billion transistors so that would be more like a 4/5 year doubling rather than two years. That said there's a chart in Wikipedia showing it still going on https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/The_Moore%27s_Law_Update_%E2%80%94_for_128_years_-_54181414828.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/The_Moor... but that's calculations per second per dollar rather than transistors per chip like Moore. More came up with the law in 1965 and thought it would run 10 years till 1975 so it's had a good run if it's petering out now. The compute per sec per dollar is a longer trend ~1900 that will likely keep on. Gemini thinks: "The machine that began the long-term trend often cited as "128 years of Moore's Law" was Herman Hollerith's tabulating machine, created for the 1890 U.S. Census"
- umvi 1y agoI would buy a mac mini with an M* chip in the blink of an eye if merely upgrading the RAM didn't double the cost of the unit
- NetMageSCW 1y agoYou’re in luck then, it doesn’t double the cost.
- umvi 1y agoIt's pretty close to double. Sorry, but I just can't justify $400 for a measly 16GB of RAM
- newman8r 1y agoWhat's sad is there's still no asahi support for m4. I have one and I barely ever use it for that reason.
- aetherspawn 1y agoWish boot camp was free again… sick of paying for parallels.
- sneak 1y agoCool. My maxxed out M4 Max MBP is scheduled for delivery tomorrow. Guess I’ll return it.
- ppeetteerr 1y agoThe M5 Pro/Max models are likely going to arrive in March (but maybe earlier)
- sneak 1y agoOh, the M5s available max out at 32GB ram, even in the MBP. That’s a nonstarter for me in a pro machine.
- zhyder 1y ago"complementing the Neural Accelerators in the CPU and GPU" seems to be a misprint; I don't believe they have the accelerators in the CPU too. Still super interesting architecture with accelerators in each GPU core _and_ a dedicated neural engine. Any links to software documentation for how to leverage both together, or when to leverage one vs the other?
- perdomon 1y agoIt's kind of crazy that they insist on doing basically one of these every year. A lot of people complain that the iPhone stopped changing (meaningfully) between updates several years back. I think Apple Silicon is bound to be the same. I will say that the M4 Mac Mini was groundbreaking in terms of a budget-friendly Apple product -- I hope they recognized why it was loved and continue to iterate in that direction.
- jtrn 1y agoNo wifi 7. No 5g. No 16". No upgrade to Max ram. No upgrade to screen. No Bluetooth 6. No upgrade for me. I’ll stay with my M1 Max for now.
- _zoltan_ 1y agoyou're comparing your M1 Max with the base model M5, not M5 Max. chill. it will come.
- elnatro 1y agoI don’t understand why they don’t advertise this cpu as one capable of running local LLMs, because it can, right?
- anuraj 1y agoToo underwhelming. Apple under Tim Cook has been running out of steam. What prevents Apple from having 100s of GPU cores and higher memory bandwidth? They need to catch the AI wave before they perish under it.
- pertymcpert 1y agoWhat are you talking about? People love Macs for running local LLMs.
- hu3 1y agoFor real work tho? My colleagues couldn't get past toy demos. And it ruins battery life. For coding it's on par with GPT3 at best which is amateur tier these days. It's good for text to speech and speech to text but PCs can do that too.
- cactusplant7374 1y agoWhy would anyone run AI workloads without being plugged in? It's going to trash your battery.
- seec 1y agoSo basically, that kills the whole argument about Apple Silicon efficiency. Which I know is almost a lie, since it's quite efficient but if you really hit the SoC hard you are still getting around 3hrs battery life at most. Of course, that's better than the 1,5hrs you would get at best from an efficient x86 SoC but it makes the advantage not as good as they make it out to be. You are going to need a power source, a later sure, but that's just a problem displacement.
- pertymcpert 1y agoAre you just making up numbers? Power efficiency is relative, and the argument about Apple Silicon efficiency was a thing since M1 and you have to compare it to the competitors at the time. Of course Intel have caught up a lot of ground. But even if your numbers weren't pulled out of your ass, a 3hr vs 1.5hr difference is a *100%* improvement. In what multiverse is that not absolutely phenomenal?
- mrkaluzny 1y agoEmm… why it says that a charger is not included on the purchase. That’s just crazy.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoWelcome to the EU.
- apatheticonion 1y agoWake me up when I can play video games on my MacBook and I'll upgrade my MacBook M1 Pro. Until then, I take a mini PC with me along with my M1 when I travel and use game streaming for gaming and offload dev and AI work via ssh + ssh remote tools. To me, M5 has amazing hardware, but they put square wheels on a Ferrari
- thomascountz 1y agoImagine Apple released a laptop that shipped without MacOS. Just the hardware, drivers, and the integrated M-series chips. The MacBook Zero
- tonyhart7 1y agonever see the day that I would say that Apple device is one of the best to run LLM
- warrenmiller 1y agowhy only on the 14'' not the 16'' ?
- YouAreWRONGtoo 1y agoWhen it allows installing any Linux with working drivers, I will consider it. Otherwise, you can go back to your garage and I will continue to make fun of people using Macs.
- shitloadofbooks 1y agoWhy do you care so much? Sounds exhausting...
- zelias 1y agoDo I want to buy this, an M1 or an M4?
- Findecanor 1y agoM1 is expected to stop getting MacOS updates sooner. There have been rumours of an upcoming entry-level MacBook with M1-class performance that wouldn't have that problem. Personally, I'm looking forward to M1 MacBook Pros dropping in price so I could nab one for cheap for running Asahi Linux.
- gr4vityWall 1y agoif only the Linux support was good. Or any other UNIX-like that made it usable without having to deal with macOS. It's a shame, because the hardware is top tier.
- waterTanuki 1y agoI can't imagine how frustrating it must be to be making some of the best hardware out there only to have it completely wasted on useless "liquid glass" UIs and locked down to a half-baked OS (looking at you iPadOS).
- unit149 1y ago[dead]
- eth0ws 1y ago"When compared to Intel-based systems, it delivers up to 86x faster AI performance" I'm imagining the engineers responsible for running the tests finely tuning the test suite for days and days so they could get that number into the press release, lol. There's no way that's a coincidence and someone definitely advocated for that line being the way it is. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-inch-macbook-pro-powered-by-the-m5-chip/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...
- hyperadvanced 1y agoGod bless them if so
- Aperocky 1y agoWhat does AI performance even mean for intel based mac systems.. The last one was like 5 years ago?
- XelNika 1y ago> production 1.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645, 16GB of RAM, and 2TB SSD https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/#footnote-4 https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/#footnote-4 So yes, that is compared to a very old 14 nm design, presumably the i7-8557U per Wikipedia.
- zingar 1y agoYour comment implies that it’s obviously not this spec that they compare against. Could you spell it out for the ignorant like me? What about that config makes it definitely not the thing that is 86x slower?
- jdiff 1y agoI don't see anything in the GP that implies that. It's simply a CPU that was released before an entire AI economic bubble was a twinkle in Jensen Huang's eye. Of course it has piss-poor AI performance vs something with hardware dedicated to accelerating that workflow. It's not that the comparison is incorrect, just that it's a silly and unenlightening statement, bordering on completely devoid of meaning if it weren't for the x86 pun.
- balderdash 1y agoI find the Apple naming conventions / product updates confusing. The MacBook Pro with the m5 is the low end model? an M2 Ultra is better than the m5? I understand what they’re doing from a roadmap standpoint - but as a pure consumer is a bit confusing
- brikym 1y agoI just want them to fix all the MacOS liquid 'ass issues.
- thefounder 1y agoIs my M2 Ultra studio with 128GB of ram just “dead weight” now? Wish I would have got just a Mac mini or Mac Pro….
- flakes 1y agoWhat does “4x the peak GPU compute performance” mean here? No latency difference, but higher throughput? The footnote was not at all helpful > Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
- smolder 1y agoLet's not pretend these are machines for hardcore computing jobs which belong on servers in terms of work/cost. Apples laptops are still amazing because we can do crazy amounts of work quickly without running out of battery. The edit, recompile, test loop is fast for programmers equipped with these expensive machines. And you can carry them everywhere without much risk of failure.
- croemer 1y agoIf you work on scripts that run in a minute or two, it's not worth the hassle of running it on servers. Yet it's long enough that saving 50% is meaningful. I happen to often work on such tasks so I really notice improvements in single and multicore performance.
- hmottestad 1y agoI don't think anyone is pretending that a Macbook Pro can compare to 8 H100 cards from Nvidia in terms of LLM training or for serving LLMs. But you can buy an awful many macbooks for the price of 8 H100 GPUs. But if your workload belongs on 8 H100 GPUs then there isn't much point in trying to run it on a macbook. You'd be better served by renting them by the hour, or if you have a quarter million dollars you can always just purchase them outright. The H100 is just an example, this is true for any workload that doesn't fit on a laptop.
- throwaway894345 1y ago> And you can carry them everywhere without much risk of failure. Unless you close the lid on a small grain of sand or some similarly small, hard particle, at which point the screen goes black and costs nearly as much to replace as the 1 year old computer is worth. Ask me how I know. :’(
- dmitshur 1y agoIt’ll be interesting to see how quickly this chip becomes available in the MacBook Air and Mac mini. So far those still have the previous M4 only. If it doesn’t happen later this week, how long would the wait be? A few months? More?
- operatingthetan 1y agoApple seems to be following a regular schedule of new Macbook Pros in October and Macbook Airs in March. Could change though!
- ud0 1y agoYes, but where are the production desktop app using on-device AI right now?
- RataNova 1y ago"Over 4x GPU compute performance" sounds wild until you realize it's relative to the M4
- allthebestforus 1y agoIs this the first time Apple released just the base chip and not the Pro nor the Max version at the same time? Are they trying to milk the market in small increments? Especially before Christmas. The MBP 14 M5 release came a bit unexpected. Many analysts mentioned beginning of 2026. When will M5 Pro and Max be released? What are your thoughts on comparing M4 Pro against the base version of M5?
- freeAgent 1y agoThe original M1 was released in base form before Pro/Max/Ultra variants. I think that pattern may have repeated for M2, but I'm not sure.
- typeofhuman 1y agoI just wish I could game on my ridiculously equipped and expensive MacBook.
- xbar 1y agoDoes M5 run Sonoma?
- seam_carver 1y agoMacs typically have a minimum of the latest macos on release. So no, it's likely macos 26 minimum
- myrandomcomment 1y agoI find this thread amusing. My M3 MacBook Pro just works. My family's iPhone 15s just work. My iPad Mini 6 just works. My wife's 3 year old iPad just works. Her 3 year old MacBook Air just works. My kids 3 year old M1 MacBook just works. I am an old man. My MCSE was on NT 3.51. I wrote my first code in 6502 ML. The first production network I handled used SNA. The level of Apple kit just working is a so far beyond anything I have experienced in 30+ years of being in tech.
- allthebestforus 1y ago14" MBP M4 Pro or 14" MBP M5, that’s the question.