M5 Pro and Max unveiled

[leman]

Apologies if this has already been mentioned and I missed it. Do we think there is any advantage in terms of Performance Per Area from having 6 Super + 12 Performance cores vs 12 Performance (now Super) cores and 6 efficiency cores, as we did previously?

No info as far as I am aware. If I were to guess, the new mid-cores are likely smaller than the large cores. The new CPU complex might even be smaller than the old one, which would be a big win economically.

i don't know which conversation, but not mine, because I've been focused on what it means technically for users rather than naming.

Conversation about the naming is a marketing topic. I do find marketing and business topics interesting too. I've known many brilliant engineers and scientists with great ideas and products, but completely unable to explain them to others . This stuff matters too.

Besides, there are multiple conversations being held in this thread. I think we should be capable of enough multitasking to keep track of off of them without creating too much confusion.

What's really interesting about this framing is that it places more weight on rumors than official announcements and engineering. I'd love for you to explain more about what you are thinking!

If you have a concrete question, I'd be happy to try and answer it to the best of my ability. Right now I am not sure what the question is.

 

[diamond.g]

So the GPU clock is alleged to be similar to the previous generation. Have they increased the ALU count per core to increase performance?

 

[Jimmyjames]

So the GPU clock is alleged to be similar to the previous generation. Have they increased the ALU count per core to increase performance?

It would be good to know. I had hoped we might have a new gpu architecture video, like the one released shortly after the M3’s release.

Losing hope in that happening.

 

[leman]

So the GPU clock is alleged to be similar to the previous generation. Have they increased the ALU count per core to increase performance?

We already know some of the story from A19. Some integer operations are faster, two FP16 operations can be executed per cycle (doubling the resources), more bandwidth, more efficient resource allocation and scheduling. M5 shows some healthy GPU gains over M4, so I assume the same will apply to new models too.

 

[dada_dave]

Apologies if this has already been mentioned and I missed it. Do we think there is any advantage in terms of Performance Per Area from having 6 Super + 12 Performance cores vs 12 Performance (now Super) cores and 6 efficiency cores, as we did previously?

Aye I also proposed that it might do so above as another rationale for doing this but we won’t know until we get die shots. Hopefully the new core type and the new fusion die is an incentive for die shot makers to release both base M5 and M5 Pro/Max die shots.

 

[Nycturne]

Conversation about the naming is a marketing topic. I do find marketing and business topics interesting too. I've known many brilliant engineers and scientists with great ideas and products, but completely unable to explain them to others . This stuff matters too.

For me, I also think the marketing topic is a little easier to argue over at the moment. We have a rough idea of what Apple did technically based on what they've said and claimed, but beyond what's already been said about the approach, I'm happy to wait until we have more concrete details.

No info as far as I am aware. If I were to guess, the new mid-cores are likely smaller than the large cores. The new CPU complex might even be smaller than the old one, which would be a big win economically.

I'd almost bet on it. This really seems to be optimizing floorplan/footprint to me. Enough large cores for the couple single threaded things that benefit that will run at a time, and then more space/power efficient cores to get MT uplift over M4. I'd also guess that the mid-cores are effectively treated much the same as efficiency cores by the scheduler. Low QoS goes to the smaller cores by default. High QoS spills over from the large cores as load increases.

Really, the design of a few high-power cores with a bunch of smaller cores makes a lot of sense to me, based on the sort of loads I've seen over the years. You just aren't going to saturate 10 large cores with single-threaded work that gets the most benefit from it. So if you have enough large cores to handle the bursty work you need them for, and then your smaller cores are fast enough to deliver better multi-threaded performance per watt, or square nm, you go do that. And this new middle core I think is what enables Apple to pursue this approach.