Apple’s M5 processors put Macs at the top of the chip speed league
The first speed tests for Macs equipped with Apple’s newly-introduced M5 processors are beginning to appear. As expected, these tell an optimistic story, making it really clear that as Apple iterates the chip with higher end versions (M5 Pro, Max, and Ultra) the company will put even more deep blue water between its closest competitors.
Look at it like this:
The M5 chip inside the MacBook Pro already beats Qualcomm’s powerful Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme SoC, and is ahead of many of the most powerful desktop CPUs, despite the much larger power consumption of those machines.
Fast-paced evolution
Tom’s Hardware informs us of that the M5 is delivering single-core performance of 4,263 in the Mac and 17,862 in multicore performance. Also equipped with an M5 processor, the iPad Pro comes in with 4,138 single-core and 16,366 in multicore performance. The difference is ccounted for by their different heat sink and clock speed. The M5 in the MacBook Pro runs at 4.61GHz compared to 4.43GHz in the iPad Pro.
That’s 5% faster than the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme for single-core performance, but the processor also competes against the leading desktop processors from both Intel and AMD. (Including the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Intel Core i9-14900KS desktop processors). It does more than compete in single-core tests, where Apple’s notebook chip leads by an extravagant margin.
What about the M5 desktops?
But what makes those tests more intereting is that Apple also makes desktop alternatives of its processors. Once it ships those then it is likely to absolutely leave competitors behind. They’ll catch up eventually, I guess, but right now for many competitors it’s still about delivering PCs that almost catch up with the M1 Macs, let along anything else.
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