Two different tech authors for notebookcheck got it wrong:
Apple has officially launched the 14" and 16" MacBook Pro lineups powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max SoCs. With up to an 18-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 128 GB memory and twice the storage for the base variants, Apple's high-end MacBook Pro lineup has finally caught up to the M5 generation.
www.notebookcheck.net
The Apple M5 Pro and Apple M5 Max have been shown off alongside the new MacBook Pro models. Both chips get a much-needed CPU core count increase, with the M5 Max supporting more RAM than its predecessor.
www.notebookcheck.net
They both think the new P-cores are just rebranded E-cores and the Efficiency core branding has been dropped.
Well, it is notebookcheck.net. Not my idea of the most reliable information source in the world.
They didn't really think this one through, if you ask me. If the new "performance" cores were merely M5 generation E cores, I doubt M5 Pro/Max could beat M4 Pro/Max on MT performance.
I'm not really a fan of the term "super" core. Do we get "hyper" cores in a few years then?
I can understand that they want to distinguish between high-performance, more efficent performance, and efficency cores, but still...
Yeah, it's a bit silly. It would've been more accurate and less confusing to call the new type of core something like a "throughput" core, without changing anything else. I assume something like that didn't happen because modern Apple marketing is so devoted to overusing superlatives. My idea's a bit too bland for their current house style.
Also, this architecture looks similar to current Intel CPUs: A handfull performance cores, with a dozen more efficient cores.
But knowing Apple, I'm guessing that both the efficency and the "medium" performance cores are likely better than Intel's efficency cores (are they still directly derived from Atom cores as in the beginning?).
Intel's efficiency cores are indeed borrowed Atom cores, or at least started that way in Alder Lake (their first heterogenous core CPU). However, Intel likes to repurpose brands and use them for radically different products, so don't get too hung up on memories of what the original Atom product was (slow, slow, slow). The Atom core that went into Alder Lake was (iirc) said to be competitive with the old Skylake core. Respectable performance, even if not competitive with Alder Lake's performance cores, and significantly higher performance (and power, and area) than Apple's E cores.
So in a sense, Apple's new approach is similar, but the details are bound to be different. There's long been hints, for example, that P and E cores within each Apple CPU generation are co-designed - meaning the E core is probably a cut-down version of the P core, with lower frequency targets so its physical design can use more efficient library cells. They probably did much the same here, but with different tradeoffs between performance/power/area than before, producing something that's much stronger performance than an E core without going all-out the way P cores do.
All that means Apple's core types, within a single CPU generation, implement exactly the same ISA. Intel ran into trouble with Alder Lake because the Atom core implemented a different subset of the x86 ISA extensions than the performance core. They ended up having to disable a lot of stuff in the P core (notably, support for AVX512) to make ISA features uniform enough for software to deal with. Apple doesn't have that issue, ISA feature support is always (as far as I know) identical across all core types in a chip.
