By The M5 CPU, which Apple revealed on Wednesday, “ushers in the next big leap in AI performance for Apple silicon.” Customers in the United States and the United Kingdom can now pre-order the M5 in new versions of the iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, and Vision Pro.
“A chip that is faster, more efficient, and more capable”
As one might anticipate, the M5 is a more powerful processor than its predecessor, the M4. Apple promises significant increases in graphical speed in particular, even though it is still constructed using 3-nanometer technology (albeit third-generation, as opposed to second-gen on the M4).
The statement claims that the M5’s 10-core GPU design, which has a Neural Accelerator in each core, offers “enhanced graphics capabilities and third-generation ray tracing” in addition to “over 4x the peak GPU compute performance compared to M4”. According to Apple, the new CPU can outperform the M4 in graphics by up to 45% overall.
A 15% increase in multithreaded performance over the M4 is promised by what Apple refers to as “the world’s fastest performance core.” Additionally, the unified memory bandwidth has increased to 153GB/s, an improvement of nearly 30%.
On paper, this all seems wonderful, but why all this theoretical power? Apple is pretty explicit about AI. The current tech obsession is mentioned in the headline, the standfirst, the first subhead, the captions of the first two pictures, twice in the first paragraph, twice in the second paragraph, three times in the third paragraph, and in the M5’s press release, in contrast to the M4 announcement in May 2024, which only mentioned AI twice in the first seven paragraphs.
Therefore, we should anticipate hearing a lot more about Apple Intelligence in the upcoming year. We can concentrate on the first three products that use the M5 microprocessor for the time being, though.
New iPad Pro
The M5 is the primary—indeed, nearly the only—significant update for the upcoming iPad Pro, which will be released in the fall of 2025. With four exceptions—it has the M5 chip, Wi-Fi 6E has been upgraded to Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3 has been upgraded to Bluetooth 6, and it has a new fast-charging feature—the M5 Pro is the same size, the same design, and comes in the same colors as the M4 model.
Apple says the new gadget has “up to 3.5x the AI performance than iPad Pro with M4 and up to 5.6x faster than iPad Pro with M1.” The M5 is undoubtedly the headline change. However, the final item on my list can also be a desirable update. According to Apple, with the appropriate adapter, you can charge the new iPad Pro to 50% capacity in 30 minutes.
Only the cellular models are impacted by the other change. They received the C1X modem from Apple, which debuted with the iPhone 17.
The 11-inch and 13-inch models of the M5 iPad Pro start at $999 and £1,299, respectively. Preorders for it begin today, and on Wednesday, October 22, it will go on sale. Visit our iPad Pro news center to learn more about this device.
