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Big leap in Apple Silicon: M5 Pro, M5 Max fuse chiplets, add third core design

MacDailyNews

Mar 3

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M5 Pro and M5 Max are built using the new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture that connects two dies with advanced IP blocks into a single SoC, delivering significant performance increases that push the limits of what’s possible with the new MacBook Pro.

Apple today unveiled the M5 Pro and M5 Max, the latest additions to the M5 family. Traditionally, Pro and Max variants simply scale up the base chip’s design — adding more CPU cores, GPU cores, and memory bandwidth. This time, however, the M5 Pro and Max represent a major departure from previous generations, introducing Apple’s new Fusion Architecture (which fuses two chiplets into one SoC) and a revamped CPU with three distinct core types: super cores, all-new performance cores optimized for multithreaded efficiency, and the base efficiency cores.

Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica:
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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 and the Thunderbolt ports for driving displays.
The second die is where the two chips differ; the M5 Pro gets up to 20 GPU cores, a single media encoding/decoding engine, and a memory controller with up to 307 GB/s of bandwidth. The M5 Max gets up to 40 GPU cores, a pair of media encoding/decoding engines, and a memory controller that provides up to 614 GB/s of memory bandwidth (note that everything in the GPU die seems to be doubled, implying that Apple is, in fact, sticking two M5 Pro GPUs together to make one M5 Max GPU).
Apple is also introducing a third distinct type of CPU core beyond the typical “performance cores” and “efficiency cores” that were included in older M-series processors.
At the top, you have “super cores,” which is Apple’s new M5-era branding for what it used to call “performance cores.” … And now, in the middle, we have a new type of “performance core” used exclusively in the M5 Pro and M5 Max.

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MacDailyNews Take: Tons more in the full article – recommended – here.

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