Apple unveils M5 in refreshed MacBook Pro, iPad Pro and Vision Pro

Apple on October 15 unveiled its next-generation M5 system-on-chip and said it will appear immediately in refreshed versions of the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the 11- and 13-inch iPad Pro, and an updated Vision Pro headset, all of which are available for preorder and begin reaching customers later this month. The company positioned the M5 as a step toward more capable on-device artificial intelligence and higher graphics performance while keeping the industrial design of the devices largely unchanged.

The M5 uses a third-generation 3-nanometer process and combines up to a 10-core CPU, a 10-core GPU with a neural accelerator integrated on each GPU core, and a 16-core Neural Engine. Apple said the chip raises unified memory bandwidth to 153 GB/s, and the company provided multiple performance comparisons to prior Apple silicon, characterizing CPU multithreaded gains in the mid-teens to around 20 percent and substantial GPU improvements in the high double digits for some workloads. Apple also described the chip as optimized for AI tasks that can run locally rather than in the cloud.

On the iPad Pro, Apple configured lower-capacity models with a nine-core CPU and 12 GB of RAM on 256 GB and...