With the release of the new M5 MacBook Pro and iPad Pro on October 22nd, we’re 5 generations into the Apple Silicon lineup, marking half a decade since Apple Silicon became available for consumers.
.

.
.
Although the new chip was announced quietly, it’s hard to remain silent about something – it gives pro-level chips a real run for their money. (Scores presented above using Geekbench 6).
.

.

About the M5 chip

The M5 chip seems to be a hotter-running, more performant chip than the M4, as demonstrated by Luke Miani’s thermal camera when running a Cinebench benchmark. The fan speeds were the same in the M4 as on the M5 ‘Book this test, and Apple designs the chips to hit up to 108c under load.

• A higher wattage: 30w (M5) vs 25w (M4)
  .
• The M5 bumps up to LPDDR5X-9600 (4800 MHz) RAM – Also used on iPhone 17 Pro, Pro Max.
  .
  • Fun fact: The iPhone Air uses LPDDR5X-8533 (4266 MHz), which is what the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips use.
    .
• More performance increased this year on the efficiency cores: The L2 Efficiency Core CPU Cache Cluster is now 6 MB (4 MB on M4). This means all 6 Efficiency cores have access to a total of 6 MB L2 cache altogether. Efficiency core now runs at 3 GHz – nearly the same as M1 performance core clock speeds.
  .
• A redesigned GPU: 2nd-Gen Ray tracing & Dynamic caching, new Unified image compression, a dedicated neural accelerator in each core, a new shader core, among other improvements.
  .

(Source: HOW did Apple pull this off? M5 Chip review – Luke Miani – URL)

There is also a new PCIe v4.0 Solid State Drive which is reported to come with a new SSD controller, resulting in double the read and write speeds over previous SSDs. You will notice this across the system when it comes to running benchmarks, games, loading into GPU renderings; according to Luke Miani. His video also appears to show how the M5 chip rivals the M1 Pro when it comes to exporting Final Cut Pro or Davinci Resolve.
.

.
M1 through M5 in Cinebench and Blender

(Source: Cinebench Scores – R23 and 2024 – Cinebench Website – URL, 10/24/2025)
(Source 2: https://opendata.blender.org – Benchmark – URL – 10/25/2025)
.

(Source: M4 vs M5 MacBook Pro ULTRA Comparison – Holy SMOKES, Apple! – URL)
.

We’ve come a long way

The multicore performance in the M5 rivals the M1 ultra, single core performance is roughly double that of the M1 – imagine what this means for entry level Macs in the future, such as the Mac mini or iMac? Gaming performance already looks quite promising, and according to benchmarks done elsewhere, it appears the M5 chip trades blows with the M1 Pro.
.

(Source: To Replace This Battery, You Have to Remove Everything | M5 MacBook Pro Teardown – iFixit)

• The M4 chip is already more powerful than the base GPU which came with the 2019 Mac Pro.
  .
• According to Geekbench 6: The M5’s GPU is 2x faster than fast as the M1 in OpenCL and Metal.
  .
• Neural GPU Accelerators provide a major boost for AI and AI benchmarks. Max Weinbach saw a 35% increase in performance in Decode Prefill Qwen3 1.7 512/128 when enabling the Neural GPU accelerators in the M5, versus leaving them off.

• See: M5 Apple Silicon: It’s All About the Cache And Tensors
  .

M1 through M5 in detail

(Note: As information comes in, this will be retroactive updated.)