New M5 Chips Spotted in iOS 26.3 Beta

[jouster]

I would love to have a chip I can comfortably game with so I can ditch my PC. What would be useful in my opinion is if Apple released an ARM based thunderbolt 5 eGPU. This would keep the Mac cooler being external, plus it would allow a lot of Mac buyers to upgrade their Macs later or independently of the Mac's GPU. Maybe having a second GPU could work together to give more processing power.

I think that’s less likely than an Ultra in a laptop.

 

[Aries79]

What about... The Mac Pro... It's the oldest machine in the lineup and the only chip option is an M2 Ultra that starts at $7k. If they offer an M5 Max chipset in the Mac Pro, they can come down market a little bit, but still come in above the Mac Studio. There's a huge gap between a $4k Mac Studio and a $7k Mac Pro.

I would bet there's customers that want the expandabliity of the Mac Pro, but would be happy to have the M5 Max as an option. Perhaps the Mac Pro with a theoretical M5 Max would start at $4,499.00 or $4999.00. Just speculation, but they would undoubtedly expand the sales of the Mac Pro by lowering the barrier to entry.

I believe that the Pro will be canceled, instead we are going to see the possibility to tie up more Mac Studios together.

 

[cuhulin]

wonder what the base ram amount will be on the m5 max?

Probably 256K, given that RAM has gotten so expensive, and the actual date you can buy it will be April 1.

 

[Vincent Hanna]

"I bet there's customers" = "I would personally like..."

If Apple ever makes another Mac Pro it will move even further UPmarket, not down. You're never getting your Fry's Electronics expandable desktop tower.

 

[Populus]

It remains to be seen if the redesigned Mini gets the same cadence as MBP and/or MBA. I think probably yes, but it’s currently an unknown.

On the merits, if we’re talking about M5 versus M6 (and not M5 Pro versus M6 Pro, where I would not wait), then I would wait for WMCM packaging with the A20/M6, the successor to InFO. TSMC recently (late January) gave a tour of its physical build-out to trusted local Taiwan media, here is a translation/distillation of a comparison table used in one of the local stories:

View attachment 2602064

Yeah, it seems like maybe it is worth it waiting for the M6 Mac mini, however, with the soaring prices, maybe it’s not that good of an idea to wait…

 

[sevoneone]

I would love to have a chip I can comfortably game with so I can ditch my PC. What would be useful in my opinion is if Apple released an ARM based thunderbolt 5 eGPU. This would keep the Mac cooler being external, plus it would allow a lot of Mac buyers to upgrade their Macs later or independently of the Mac's GPU. Maybe having a second GPU could work together to give more processing power.

There is nothing that prevents an NVidia or AMD GPU from working with an ARM based computer. People plug them into Raspberry Pi’s all the time… Either Apple just doesn’t want to support this, or there is a technical barrier that keeps this from working because of Apple Silicon’s unique unified memory setup, which I am guessing is the case. Even 16 lanes of PCI-E 5 is almost 10x slower than the unified memory bandwidth in an M4 Max. TB 5 is 4 lanes of PCI-E 4, which is about 100x slower than the unified memory. I can see why it could cause a big performance loss.

 

[hoodlum90]

Yeah, it seems like maybe it is worth it waiting for the M6 Mac mini, however, with the soaring prices, maybe it’s not that good of an idea to wait…

That is the conundrum. I am leaning towards the M5 MacBook but will wait to see if the Max is released in the next month. I expect the M6 MacBook Pro will have a huge price increase due to new case/OLED, 2nm CPU/GPU and big memory price increase.

 

[maxoakland]

Apple's new back pack cooler will keep your Ultra whiz bang laptop cool when connected no matter what it is doing....

Damn they really could’ve used that during the G5 era

 

[savantgk3]

The obvious explanation is that Apple has reached the limits of UltaFusion across 2 dies (hence last one was M3 Ultra, couldn't stretch up to M4), and is going back to a single die chip configuration. From a marketing perspective, that's M5 Max (the low end Pro chip) and M5 Ultra (the high end Pro chip), previously named Pro and Max respectively. So the Ultra moniker doesn't get dropped, but it's a Max under the bonnet.

For the Mac Studio they will simply clock them faster than in the laptop, with higher power consumption and running hotter but with appropriate cooling.

And the Ultras as we have known them are gone...

Also, as unified memory doesn't work in a multi-socket configuration (the Intel/AMD approach) scaling up server side will be based on clustering multiple servers (as happens say with NVIDIA GPUs), hence the recent improvements in macOS 26 to support more effective ThunderBolt 5 clustering/distributed shared memory (reminds me of InfiniBand).

This makes the most sense to me. If anyone thinks they're skipping the M5 Pro and Max MacBooks then ok, but then why do M4 Pro and Max MBPs have 1 month+lead times? The current Mini and Studios have M4 Pro and Max chips and use the same RAM and storage and they're shipping in days. Makes no business sense for Apple to nuke one of their best selling product lines weeks before announcing an update to... another product? There's some MacBook coming in days/weeks, it just may not be a direct naming/configuration correlation to M4 and prior. Mac Studios/Pros may be coming too, but that's in addition to MBP, not instead of.

 

[Haiku_Oezu]

So is the M4 Ultra just not happening? 🤔

 

[vr38dett]

"I bet there's customers" = "I would personally like..."

If Apple ever makes another Mac Pro it will move even further UPmarket, not down. You're never getting your Fry's Electronics expandable desktop tower.

I have no horse in the Mac Pro race, so nothing more than a supposition that an M5 Max chip option would fill the gap between the top-tier Mac Studio and the current base Mac Pro. I have no interest whatsoever in buying one. There's a market for the Mac Pro-- there are people out there that need to be able to run NVidia's latest GPU's because Apple's GPU's are still handily trounced in many benchmarks.

So is the M4 Ultra just not happening? 🤔

Correct. The M4 Max chip was not taped out with the UltraFusion Interconnect that allows the connection between the two M4 Max chips. Apple has said that not every generation of M-series processors will have an Ultra version.

 

[groove-agent]

e

I think that’s less likely than an Ultra in a laptop.

Hard to say. Apple is putting ARM chips in studio displays so why not an eGPU? Putting an Ultra in a laptop might be a technical limitation, an eGPU would be more of a limitation with Apple's commitment to gaming / higher-risk products.

 

[kemal]

I still fear the MBP will go M5 Ultra and the M5 Pro won't happen. Then, the Mac mini will go to A series chips.

 

[Populus]

e

Hard to say. Apple is putting ARM chips in studio displays so why not an eGPU? Putting an Ultra in a laptop might be a technical limitation, an eGPU would be more of a limitation with Apple's commitment to gaming / higher-risk products.

Actually, this is a brilliant idea and, if I don’t see Apple doing it, it’s because they’re not on the monitor business… but this would be more of a Mac peripheral honestly.

The Studio Display already has an A13 and is rumored to have an A19 inside, on the next iteration. We’ve seen the Studio Display on the inside, it looks like an strange iMac, with the PCB and the main chip.

I see it perfectly possible to put just a GPU, a cluster of M5 GPU cores (just 20 or 40) to give the connected MacBook pro a nice push in graphics. All while avoiding the thermal constraints of a thin MacBook Pro.

You may think… but how could the Mac make use of those screen integrated GPU cores? Easy: Thunderbolt 5 connector. I’m not sure but I’d say it has enough bandwidth to carry both the image data, the USB data transfer, AND the GPU information.

However… maybe the bandwidth is not enough for all that data volume? I’m not sure, honestly.

 

[groove-agent]

Actually, this is a brilliant idea and, if I don’t see Apple doing it, it’s because they’re not on the monitor business… but this would be more of a Mac peripheral honestly.

The Studio Display already has an A13 and is rumored to have an A19 inside, on the next iteration. We’ve seen the Studio Display on the inside, it looks like an strange iMac, with the PCB and the main chip.

I see it perfectly possible to put just a GPU, a cluster of M5 GPU cores (just 20 or 40) to give the connected MacBook pro a nice push in graphics. All while avoiding the thermal constraints of a thin MacBook Pro.

You may think… but how could the Mac make use of those screen integrated GPU cores? Easy: Thunderbolt 5 connector. I’m not sure but I’d say it has enough bandwidth to carry both the image data, the USB data transfer, AND the GPU information.

However… maybe the bandwidth is not enough for all that data volume? I’m not sure, honestly.

I had brought this same point up a while ago when MR rumoured a display with an Apple Silicon chip in it. As mainstream as gaming is, I can't see Apple marketing a studio display for gaming. It's too of an esoteric of a product, and most of all, studio displays are stupidly expensive compared to the competition spec-wise.