Apple's M5 chip brings faster AI to MacBook, iPad, and Vision Pro

Apple's new M5 chip is aimed at speeding up AI features on the MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro. Apple says the M5 delivers more than four times the GPU performance for AI tasks compared to the previous M4 chip. Each of the ten GPU cores includes a built-in "Neural Accelerator." The 16-core Neural Engine can process up to 38 trillion operations per second, making it 60 percent faster than the Neural Engine in the M4. The CPU is also up to 15 percent quicker at multi-threaded processing.

The chip uses a third-generation 3 nm manufacturing process, offers 153 GB/s of shared memory bandwidth (about 30 percent more than before), and supports up to 32 GB of unified memory. This allows larger AI models to run directly on the device. Apple expects that existing AI apps and tools like Apple Intelligence will see faster performance. Developers can access the AI hardware using Core ML, Metal 4, and Tensor APIs.