The base model has, for a very long time, been $1999. It's now $2199 for a base model. The value is the same as before, but the price of the base model did go up. That's all I'm saying. If you won't use or need 1TB, you're spending $200 more than you want to.
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Apple Debuts M5 Pro and M5 Max Chips
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I don’t have any use of such powerful machines. My 14” M1pro is more than enough for my needs. If nothing goes wrong, I will keep it until it becomes obsolete. MBA is enough but Pro has better display.
Got any links for these benchmarks? I haven’t see anything that makes me think they’re impressive.
Qualcomm: “Look over here! Our power-hungry 18 core X2 Elite actually does some things faster than a 10 core M5.”
If I‘m not mistaken, the price increase should only affect DRAM chips, which Apple aren’t using with their M chips. That said, I fully expect every remotely adjacent area to be pulled along, just because they can.
I wonder if they’re separating the CPU and GPU. Using the 18 CPU core and 40 GPU core blocks you could get:
36 CPU, 40 GPU.
18 CPU, 80 GPU.
36 CPU, 80 GPU.
Yes, that's kinda what I'm saying without saying it. Like for the M5 Max you have to get the 2TB drive even tho you probably have an external SSD and don't need that extra space. It sucks. But at least you can get 64GB RAM on an M5 Pro now tho.
What I specced specifically tho has not gone up in price.
This is meaningless, in theory Apple has been iterating custom silicon since the A4 chip for the iPhone more than 10 generations ago, and Qualcomm has been making custom silicon since the '90s. The first Snapdragon chip from Qualcomm is from 2007.
One thing that's possibly holding me back is still the lack of AV1 encoding. From what I see it's same encoder decoder as M3 and M4. meaning H264, H265/HEVC, and pro Res encoders, and same decoders + AV1.
Since I mostly use my macbook pro for content creation on platforms that use AV1 as highest video quality, it still does bum me out a little apple is slow when it comes to media codec adoption. I'm forced to downscale to HEVC when doing live streams or making videos. ProRes is great and all on video front don't get me wrong, but no one is gonna be streaming in ProRes.
Since I mostly use my macbook pro for content creation on platforms that use AV1 as highest video quality, it still does bum me out a little apple is slow when it comes to media codec adoption. I'm forced to downscale to HEVC when doing live streams or making videos. ProRes is great and all on video front don't get me wrong, but no one is gonna be streaming in ProRes.
On the CPU cores--branding confusion aside, it seem very clear Apple has made the choice (in both the M5 Max and M5 Pro chips, as compared with their M4 equivalents) to dramatically decrease the number of cores that use more power and dramatically increase the number of cores that are more frugal on power usage. Almost certainly for battery life, perhaps even for better chip yields.
I've got to believe that the whole M5 chip family uses the same base core technologies. If that is so, I think the specific workloads people have are going to determine if this is better for them or not. For heavily threaded workloads, Apple is indicating a 30% uplift which is quite impressive if true. But there are a lot of workloads that are still lightly multi-threaded, if multi-threaded at all. M5 Max (6 high power cores, and 12 low power cores) vs M4 Max (12 high power cores, and 4 low power cores) . . . I can definitely think of certain workloads that I would guess should perform better on more higher power cores.
There is another consideration here, given this "Fusion Architecture". If this mix discussion was made because of batter life, the alternative decisions could be make for the M5 Mac Studio, at the least. Why couldn't an M5 Ultra chip have not just double the number of M5 Max cores . . . why couldn't the M5 Ultra have a complete or almost complete high performance CPU core layout? Lots of people have need for the absolute greatest cpu performance.
I've got to believe that the whole M5 chip family uses the same base core technologies. If that is so, I think the specific workloads people have are going to determine if this is better for them or not. For heavily threaded workloads, Apple is indicating a 30% uplift which is quite impressive if true. But there are a lot of workloads that are still lightly multi-threaded, if multi-threaded at all. M5 Max (6 high power cores, and 12 low power cores) vs M4 Max (12 high power cores, and 4 low power cores) . . . I can definitely think of certain workloads that I would guess should perform better on more higher power cores.
There is another consideration here, given this "Fusion Architecture". If this mix discussion was made because of batter life, the alternative decisions could be make for the M5 Mac Studio, at the least. Why couldn't an M5 Ultra chip have not just double the number of M5 Max cores . . . why couldn't the M5 Ultra have a complete or almost complete high performance CPU core layout? Lots of people have need for the absolute greatest cpu performance.
We might see AV1 encoding in the M6 processors. It is the one glaring feature omission in the M5.
Will we see an M5 Ultra later? These new Pro and Max chips top out at 18 CPU cores, less than the M3 Ultra's total of 32 cores (24 P-cores + 8 E-cores).
TruthAboveAllElse
macrumors 6502a
Well you have to use Tahoe in order to use that software.
No one is finding a problem with their scenic tour of macOS Tahoe.
BorisDG
macrumors 6502a
The "Super Cores" are the old performance cores. The new performance cores are actually new aka "mCores".
"M-Core, which is a cut from P-Core to M-Core, between P and E-Core. It has 7-wide decoding and the performance of P-Core is 70% of that of P-Core."
Source: https://t.co/go5QWgtOcM
For example pCore is 10 wide and eCore was 6 wide. mCore is 7 wide.
You're suggesting that Macs can't do AV1 encoding, and that's false. It's not built-in at the hardware layer.
Plenty of software that encodes AV1, and Macs run it just fine.
The new naming is, to be honest, confusing.
The M5 Pro/Max cores are called super and "all-new performance" but on regular M5 they're called now super and still efficient.
Feels like they're making M6 (and/or Pro/Max) or later with 3 different cores - super, performance and efficient, because why wouldn't they change the naming of regular M5's efficient cores to the "all-new performance" if they already changed performance to "super"?
The M5 Pro/Max cores are called super and "all-new performance" but on regular M5 they're called now super and still efficient.
Feels like they're making M6 (and/or Pro/Max) or later with 3 different cores - super, performance and efficient, because why wouldn't they change the naming of regular M5's efficient cores to the "all-new performance" if they already changed performance to "super"?
Pressure
macrumors 603
This also happens to be the model that is most likely to see a price drop from 3rd party retailers.
Thanks for confirming that. It's literally what I thought after seeing the new naming on the regular M5 and then on M5 Pro/Max.
They have 3 different cores now, similar to Qualcomm/Exynos.
BorisDG
macrumors 6502a
rezwits
macrumors 6502a
No. Studios get the Max and Ultra chips. Mini's get the base and Pro chips.
In either case, since Apple didn't update the Mini and Studio with the MacBooks, I fear it is going to be awhile until they update the desktops to squeeze as many people anxious for the M5 into higher margin MacBooks. I think we'll be luck to see them by WWDC.
I think the new performance cores on Pro&Max are actually new. The super moniker is just a rebrand though. But the rebrand is necessary. They couldnt call it performance and new performance cores.
The new performance core is NOT a rebrand of the efficiency core.
But I guess they could have stayed with performance core for the best performant one and called the new ones Pretty-good-o-cores.
Frantisekj
macrumors 65816
Specifically in compute. And specifically in machine learning and AI workflows that use the GPU because there are neural engines inside each GPU core now. It's like how Nvidia does it. It it a big deal for certain workflows, like Magic Mask, tracking, and Upscaling/Sharpening in video apps. Those tasks should be a lot faster now. For instance my M1 Max tracks a magic mask in Davinci Resolve at around 5-6 fps. An M4 Pro with a 16 core GPU about the same. A desktop with a last gen Nvidia 4070 can do it in real time or faster. M5 should hopefully close this gap as it is an area where Apple Silicon has been lacking.