But! Before you buy one of the M4-based MacBook Airs, our testing of the MacBook Pro's new M5 chip should give you some insight into whether it's worth waiting a few months(?) for the Air's update.
Apple M5 testing
We also ran some tests on the M5 as part of our M5 iPad Pro review, but running macOS instead of iPadOS on top gives us much more testing flexibility—more benchmarks and some high-end games to run, as well as command line access to analyze power consumption and efficiency.
However, to back up for a moment and restate the chip's specs, the M5 is built from the same basic parts as the M4: four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency CPU cores (compared to four in the M1/M2/M3), 10 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine to handle some machine learning and AI workloads.
The M5's technical improvements are more focused and subtle than just increasing clock speeds or core counts. First is a 27.5 percent increase in memory bandwidth, from the M4's 120 GB/s to 153 GB/s (achieved, I'm told, by a combination of faster RAM and a memory design that facilitates communication between different areas of the chip. Integrated GPUs are typically bottlenecked primarily by memory bandwidth, and secondarily by the number of cores, so improving bandwidth Memory capacity can have a fairly direct, linear impact on graphics performance.
Apple also says it has added a “Neural Accelerator” to each of its GPU cores, separate from the Neural Engine. This will benefit some specific types of workloads – things like MetalFX graphics scaling or frame generation that previously had to use the Neural Engine can now do that work entirely within the GPU, eliminating a little latency and freeing the Neural Engine to do other tasks. Apple also claims “more than 4x peak GPU performance compared to the M4,” which Apple says will speed up local execution of AI language models and imaging software. This figure is mainly due to GPU improvements; According to Geekbench AI, the Neural Engine itself is only about 10 percent faster than what's on the M4.
