[DigitalToday reporter Hyunwoo Choo (추현우)] Apple has unveiled the M5 Pro and M5 Max, advanced chips for pro laptops used in the new MacBook Pro. Based on an Apple-designed fusion architecture, the chips combine two dies into a single system-on-chip (SoC). They integrate the CPU, GPU, media engine, unified memory controller, neural engine and Thunderbolt 5.

The new chips feature an 18-core CPU made up of 6 super cores and 12 performance cores. With a mix of super cores designed to maximise single-thread performance and performance cores aimed at improving power efficiency, performance on professional workloads improves by up to 30 percent. On a multi-thread basis, performance improves by up to 2.5 times versus the M1 Pro and Max.

The GPU scales up to 40 cores and includes a neural accelerator for each core. Based on expanded unified memory bandwidth, AI-dedicated GPU compute performance is more than 4 times higher than the previous generation. In apps that use ray tracing, it delivers graphics performance up to 35 percent higher than the M4 Pro and Max.

The M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory and 307GB per second of bandwidth, while the M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory and 614GB per second of bandwidth. Both apply a 16-core neural engine, a latest media engine including AV1 decoding, stronger memory integrity and on-chip native support for Thunderbolt 5.

Apple also unveiled new products including the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air equipped with the M5 chip.