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Article: Testing Apple's 2026 16-inch MacBook Pro, M5 Max, and its new "performance" cores

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5 / 10

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Apple's new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips shift from a single-die design to a new "Fusion Architecture," using separate silicon dies for CPU and GPU cores packaged together. The Pro and Max share an 18-core CPU die but differ in GPU cores (20 vs. 40), with the Max also providing greater memory bandwidth.

Another major change is the removal of traditional "efficiency" cores in these high-end chips; all large cores are now "super" cores, and they introduce a third type, confusingly named "performance" cores, which are distinct from the efficiency cores in the base M5.

While offering expected performance upgrades to users, the underlying architectural and core-naming changes represent significant technical departures for Apple's pro-level silicon.

Main topics: Apple M5 Pro/Max chip architecture, Fusion design with separate CPU/GPU dies, changes to CPU core types and naming conventions.

Original URL

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/testing-apples-2026-16-inch-macbook-pro-m5-max-and-its-new-performance-cores/

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Ars Technica

Published Date

2026-03-09 20:00

Fetched Date

2026-03-09 17:30

Processed Date

2026-03-09 17:32

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Present

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Raw Extracted Content

Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max make deceptively large changes to how Apple’s high-end laptop and desktop chips are built.
We’ve already covered those changes in some depth, but in essence: The M5 Pro and M5 Max are no longer monolithic chips with all the CPU and GPU cores and everything else packed into a single silicon die. Using an “all-new Fusion Architecture” like the one used to combine two Max chips into a single Ultra chip, Apple now splits the CPU cores (and other things) into one piece of silicon, and the GPU cores (and other things) into another piece of silicon. These two dies are then packaged together into one chip.
M5 Pro and M5 Max both use the same 18-core CPU die, but Pro uses a 20-core GPU die, and Max gets a 40-core GPU die. (Because the memory controller is also part of the GPU die, the Max chip still offers more memory bandwidth and supports higher memory configurations than the Pro one does.)
The other big change is that neither of these chips uses Apple’s “efficiency” CPU cores anymore. All of the M5 family’s large high-performance cores are now called “super” cores as of macOS 26.3.1, including the ones that originally launched as “performance” cores in the regular M5 last fall. The standard M5 still has smaller, slower efficiency cores, but M5 Pro and M5 Max use a third kind of CPU core instead, confusingly also called “performance” cores.
Users will experience the M5 Pro and M5 Max mostly as the expected iterative upgrades over last-generation chips, the same thing delivered by most new Apple Silicon processor generations. But for the technically inclined, it’s worth digging a little deeper into the M5 Max, both to learn why it performs the way it does and to dispel confusion about what’s being rebranded (the new “super” cores), and what’s actually different (the new “performance” cores in M5 Pro and M5 Max, which definitely aren’t just rebranded efficiency cores).