Apple has just updated its Mac lineup with the new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and for the first time since the launch of Apple Silicon, the company is changing how it names the different parts of its processors.
As highlighted by SixColors, Apple has finally given in to the temptation of using more marketing-friendly names for its hardware. In the past, every Apple chip had two types of cores. There were the fast ones for heavy work and the power-saving ones for light tasks. Now, the high-end chips feature a three-tier system.
The biggest change is the introduction of the super core. This is now the name for Apple’s most powerful CPU design. Interestingly, this is not just a name for future products. Apple is retroactively renaming the performance cores in the standard M5 chip to super cores as well. This means that if you own an M5 MacBook Air or an iPad Pro, the parts inside your device technically have a new name today.
The company is also reusing the performance core name for something entirely different. In the M5 Pro and M5 Max, the name performance core now refers to a middle-tier core. These cores are designed to be more efficient than the super cores but more powerful than the traditional efficiency cores.
During the announcement, Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, said: “M5 Pro and M5 Max are a monumental leap forward for Apple silicon, leveraging our new Fusion Architecture to scale the capabilities of Apple silicon while preserving its core tenets of performance, power efficiency, and unified memory architecture.”
While the PR language sounds impressive, the practical reality is that Apple is trying to find a better way to describe how it builds these massive chips. The new Fusion Architecture involves bonding two separate silicon dies together into one single package. This allows the M5 Pro and Max to pack in more hardware than a single piece of silicon could typically hold.
This shift in naming is likely a response to competitors like Qualcomm and Intel, who have used similar “Prime” or “Ultra” branding for years. By calling their top cores super, Apple is making it very clear to the average shopper that they are getting the best technology available.
Want to see more of our stories on Google?
P.S. Want to keep this site truly independent? Support us by buying us a beer, treating us to a coffee, or shopping through Amazon here. Links in this post are affiliate links, so we earn a tiny commission at no charge to you. Thanks for supporting independent Canadian media!
