Last year, the iPad was allowed to press ahead, this time the ball is in the iPad and Mac at the same time – along with the Vision Pro: Apple’s new, faster M5 chip makes its debut in both the MacBook Pro and the iPad Pro as well as the Vision Pro, as the manufacturer announced on Wednesday. In terms of design, nothing changes in the professional variants of Apple’s laptop, tablet series and the VR headset, so all of them remain unchanged in their familiar housing.
M5 with accelerated GPU
The M5 is now manufactured in the third generation of 3-nanometer technology, as Apple announced – probably referring to the N3P variant in TSMC’s 3-nanometer process, which is already used in the “A19 Pro” chip in the iPhone 17 Pro. The performance increase of the CPU with up to 10 cores remains manageable compared to the already fast M4, Apple speaks of 15 percent. Early Geekbench benchmarks by a Russian YouTuber who had already gotten his hands on an iPad Pro with M5 came to a similar conclusion. Similar to the A19 Pro, the focus of the M5 is on GPU improvements: A new graphics architecture with a “Neural Accelerator” in each core is primarily intended to accelerate AI calculations. In addition, Apple has reportedly increased the memory bandwidth again to a good 150 GByte/s.
The M5 is currently only available in the basic version in the aforementioned device series, an M5 Pro, M5 Max and possibly also M5 Ultra are pending – they could follow in early 2026. This means that Apple has only updated the base model of the MacBook Pro with a 14-inch display for the time being and continues to offer the higher-priced variants with M4 Pro and M4 Max at the same time.
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