Apple’s New M5 Chip Is Here—What You Need to Know About Its AI Power

Apple revealed its latest version of Apple Silicon first thing today, the M5 chip, and it’s all about speed, graphics, and artificial intelligence. M5 powers the latest MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro, promising faster performance across the board, especially for AI applications.

Apple says the M5 delivers over four times the AI performance of last year’s M4 chip, thanks to a new 10-core GPU with a Neural Accelerator built into each core. This lets AI-heavy tasks — like image generation, video enhancement, and large language models — run faster directly on the device instead of depending on the cloud.

It’s also a big upgrade for creators. The GPU adds third-generation ray tracing, improving how light and shadows are rendered in 3D design, games, and video production. Apple says graphics performance is up to 45% faster than M4, and up to 2.5x faster than the older M1 chip.

“M5 ushers in the next big leap in AI performance for Apple silicon,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “With the introduction of Neural Accelerators in the GPU, M5 delivers a huge boost to AI workloads. Combined with a big increase in graphics performance, the world’s fastest CPU core, a faster Neural Engine, and even higher unified memory bandwidth, M5 brings far more performance and capabilities to MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro.”

Under the hood, the M5 has a 10-core CPU (four high-performance cores and six efficiency cores) that Apple claims makes it up to 15% faster for multitasking and complex workloads compared to the M4. In plain terms, apps open quicker, edits process faster, and switching between creative software feels smoother.

The M5 also offers 153GB/s of memory bandwidth — about 30% more than the M4 — which helps when working on large video files or multiple high-performance apps at once. That extra bandwidth also supports bigger AI models running locally, something  Apple Intelligence is built around.

The 16-core Neural Engine has also been tuned for Apple’s expanding AI tools (well, except for the new smarter Siri that has still yet to come), improving how quickly devices can perform text generation, summarization, image creation, and language translation. Apple Intelligence features like Image Playground and Writing Tools should now feel more instant and responsive (for those that actually use them).

The upgraded GPU doesn’t just benefit creative software — it also makes gaming and video playback smoother. With 120Hz refresh rate support and better dynamic caching, games like Cyberpunk 2077 and 3D apps can now run with more realistic lighting and less lag. On the $5,000 Vision Pro headset, Apple says the M5 helps render 10% more display pixels with reduced motion blur. Is that worth the upgrade?

For now, the 16-inch MacBook Pro has the M4 Pro. The iMac has M4 and Mac mini has M4 and M4 Pro. Mac Studio still has M4 Max and M3 Ultra. The Mac Pro has M2 Ultra, last updated in June 2023, so it’s been over two years since the last refresh.

The M5 will debut inside the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro, all available for pre-order today and launching next week on October 22.