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Article: M5 Pro and M5 Max are surprisingly big departures from older Apple Silicon

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5 / 10

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Apple has introduced the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips alongside new MacBook Pros, marking a significant architectural departure from past generations. The chips utilize a new "Fusion Architecture" that combines two distinct chiplets—one for the CPU and I/O, and another primarily for graphics—into a single processor package.

While performance impact remains untested, the technical details reveal a unified CPU/I/O chiplet across both Pro and Max variants, containing an 18-core CPU and a 16-core Neural Engine. This design contrasts with previous scaling methods and Apple's prior use of chiplet fusion only for creating Ultra chips.

The main topics covered are the announcement of the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, their new Fusion Architecture and chiplet design, and a comparison to previous Apple Silicon generations.

Original URL

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/m5-pro-and-m5-max-are-surprisingly-big-departures-from-older-apple-silicon/

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Ars Technica

Published Date

2026-03-03 18:41

Fetched Date

2026-03-04 14:27

Processed Date

2026-03-04 15:37

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Present

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Raw Extracted Content

As part of today’s MacBook Pro update, Apple has also unveiled the M5 Pro and M5 Max, the newest members of the M5 chip family.
Normally, the Pro and Max chips take the same basic building blocks from the basic chip and just scale them up—more CPU cores, more GPU cores, and more memory bandwidth. But the M5 chips are a surprisingly large departure from past generations, both in terms of the CPU architectures they use and in how they’re packaged together.
We won’t know the impact these changes have had on performance until we have hardware in hand to test, but here are all the technical details we’ve been able to glean about the new updates and how the M5 chip family stacks up against the past few generations of Apple Silicon chips.
New Fusion Architecture and a third type of CPU core
Apple says that M5 Pro and M5 Max use an “all-new Fusion Architecture” that welds two silicon chiplets into a single processor. Apple has used this approach before, but historically only to combine two Max chips together into an Ultra.
Apple’s approach here is different—for example, the M5 Pro is not just a pair of M5 chips welded together. Rather, Apple has one chiplet handling the CPU and most of the I/O, and a second one that’s mainly for graphics, both built on the same 3nm TSMC manufacturing process.
The first silicon die is always the same, whether you get an M5 Pro or M5 Max. It includes the 18-core CPU, the 16-core Neural Engine, and controllers for the SSD, for the Thunderbolt ports, and for driving displays.