Icame, Isaw, Iconquered: With Its New M5 Chip, The Apple Macbook...

The undisputed king of integrated graphics when it works.

As my muscular colleague Jeremy pointed out already, Apple has been making gains. It's doubled the single-core performance of its in-house chips, the M-series, in five years, and while the predicted single-core score in Geekbench 6 for the new M5 was 4100 (based on the M5 iPad Pro), in my actual testing of a 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro that figure is 4310.

You know what else scores 4310 points in that test? Nothing. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D? 3332. The Core i9 14900KS? 3238. The Core Ultra 9 285K? 3214. When Apple claimed the ARM-based M5 had the best single-core performance in the world, it sure meant it.

But can it game? While you used to be able to buy desktop Macs with Radeon cards in them, we haven't seen that for a while, and no M-series processor has yet been paired with any kind of discrete GPU. Apple instead relies on the integrated graphics cores and, for more powerful desktop machines, its ability to literally glue multiple chips together to increase their number, brute-forcing a solution to the problem by throwing more silicon at it.

I tried it out already with an extraordinarily expensive Mac Studio containing a 16-core M4 Max CPU with a 40-core GPU, but what I'm attempting to play games with here is a standard M5 MacBook Pro. It's got a few upgrades—32 GB of RAM and a 4 TB SSD—but nothing that actually increases its ability to process graphics. It's a lovely laptop to use, with what Apple calls a Liquid Retina XDR screen (something the rest of us would call an IPS with mini-LED backlighting). It has a 120 Hz max refresh rate, a resolution of 3024 x 1964, and can display almost the whole DCI-P3 wide-colour gamut for a vibrant image.

3x Thunderbolt 4, HDMI, SDXC slot, 3.5 mm audio jack

The CPU is a 10-core model with four performance cores and six efficient ones, and the GPU also gets 10 of Apple's self-designed neutron stars of pixel-pushing transistors. It's made by TSMC on a 3 nm process, and if you put it in an iPad Pro (or presumably an upcoming MacBook Air, though that hasn't been announced at the time of writing) it will run perfectly happily just being passively cooled. The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, has a fan (just one, with a heat pipe, and the SoC can reach temperatures of 99 °C under heavy load) which allows its M5 to do a little more work.

The M5 GPU has a new architecture that integrates a neural accelerator inside every core. Apple has gone all-out for unseen levels of AI

Source: PC Gamer