Apple M5 Vs. M4: What's The Difference In Performance & Capability?

After first introducing the M4 chip in May 2024, Apple is ready to move on to the newly announced M5. And, as customers have been led to expect when Apple moves one of its offerings from one number to the next, the new processor brings a handful of changes over its previous generation — especially in its artificial intelligence and graphics performance. But how exactly do the two stack up in terms of performance and capabilities?

Built on third-generation 3-nanometer technology, the M5 introduces a redesigned 10-core GPU architecture with a Neural Accelerator built into each core. This is supposed to help the chip deliver more than four times the peak GPU compute performance for AI workloads over the M4. The M5's CPU configuration also includes up to 10 cores (that's four for performance and six for efficiency). That'd be about a 15% increase in multithreaded performance compared to the M4. Plus, the M5 includes a faster 16-core Neural Engine for about a 30% boost in unified memory bandwidth over the M4.

If you remember, the M4 was the first Apple chip built using second-generation 3-nanometer technology. It featured a 10-core CPU and GPU with support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shading, and Dynamic Caching to improve graphics rendering and power efficiency. The M4's Neural Engine was capable of 38 trillion operations per second, which, at the time, Apple said was faster than any neural processing unit in an AI PC. It also introduced a new display engine in support of the iPad Pro's Ultra Retina XDR display.

Now, the M5's performance on AI and graphics workloads is even better. This is thanks in part to the inclusion of Neural Accelerators within each GPU core, which distributes AI processing power more evenly across the chip. This is supposed to give users a 45% improvement in graphics performance over the M4, plus a new ray-tracing engine for more detailed rendering in applications and games. And where the M4 was launched as part of the iPad Pro, the M5 is getting a bigger rollout that includes the new Vision Pro and MacBook Pro models (the latter being one of the most anticipated gadgets to be released this year).