M5 Pro and Max unveiled

[dada_dave]

Nearly all of the reviews of the M5 have been so badly produced I can't take this conclusion seriously, especially not when it's contradicting other reviews I've seen.

We need more testing from more people, because the thing I've pointed out that no one is talking about: it can outperform M3 with 80 cores and 819 GBs of bandwidth at full load. Something isn't adding up here for their review. They could have simply gotten bad chip, which is unlikely but possible.

I haven't seen any other reviewers with the 14" M5 Max model - I don't know why they shipped that to NotebookCheck. Also some of the gaming data is corroborated with other reviews. So the Max GPU appears to be inconsistent even with the 16" model. Though it isn't all bad, the 14" M5 Max is ridiculously efficient in CP2077 in their data, even compared to the other M5s tested (well the very low power M5s in the Airs are still better, but the 14" Max is pushing that level of efficiency). Most of the odd 14" results could be explainable by a chip that is throttling or at least being deliberately constrained more than it should be, maybe a "hot" chip or a fan curve that isn't working right - setting it to High power mode as they did *should* have alleviated that, but there are other power curves than just the fan. We know that the 14" has historically struggled to cool the full Max chip in the past and we know occasionally Apple has shipped devices with ... imperfect cooling/power curves that had to be corrected after launch (typically iPhones more than Macs). So that's another possibility, beyond a bad/hot chip - which as you say is unlikely but possible.

That said their CBR24 data for 16" M5 Pro review bothers me more, that MT result doesn't just look wrong, it should not be possible - have you seen any other reviewers with that model? The other results for that model seem sensible enough (including ST), but ... that one ...

Unfortunately very few outlets measure wall power efficiency, at most they might look at powermetrics (which is not bad data, but not complete and not useful for my purposes). Notebookcheck isn't the only one that does so, but there aren't many and even fewer that do so regularly and none so easy to get lots of data for.

 

[RockRock8]

I haven't seen any other reviewers with the 14" M5 Max model. Also some of the gaming data is corroborated with other reviews. So the Max GPU appears to be inconsistent even with the 16" model. Though it isn't all bad, the 14" M5 Max is ridiculously efficient in CP2077 in their data, even compared to the other M5s tested (well the very low power M5s in the Airs are still better, but the 14" Max is pushing that level of efficiency). Most of the odd 14" results could be explainable by a chip that is throttling, maybe a "hot" chip or a fan curve that isn't working right (though setting it to High power mode as they did *should* have alleviated that). We know that the 14" has historically struggled to cool the full Max chip in the past and we know occasionally Apple has shipped devices with ... imperfect cooling curves that had to be corrected after launch (typically affects iPhones more than Macs). So that's another possibility, beyond a bad/hot chip.

That said their CBR24 data for 16" M5 Pro review bothers me more, that MT result doesn't just look wrong, it should not be possible - have you seen any other reviewers with that model? The other results for that model seem sensible enough (including ST), but ... that one ...

Unfortunately very few outlets measure wall power efficiency, at most they might look at powermetrics (which is not bad data, but not complete and not useful for my purposes). Notebookcheck isn't the only one, but there aren't many and even fewer that do so regularly.

I understand being confused by the results, but that's my point: if you can't even produce an article or video without typos, errors, flaws then I question it to begin with, down to the testing and conclusions. Nearly ALL of reviews for m5 have some sort of glaring problem in the writing or info.

Why should i trust their testing

We just wait for more testing. I still come back to the real world performance: running a 70B 6 bit transformer model, a diffusion model, and a video render at the same time on both M3 (32/80/512/819) vs M5 (18/40/128/614), and the M5 beats the highest end M3 from start to finish, 1-3 minutes faster.

yeah yeah AI and all, I've said repeatedly I don't like "AI," but it's zero argument that running 70B 6Bit TMs and diffusion models and 8K/4K render video against a machine with 4X the memory, 200 GB/s more bandwidth, 2X the encoders/decoders, and it still loses out when fully maxed out. Neural Accelerators help a lot but don't fully explain the difference, especially at complete stress test maximum capacity.

I hope notebookcheck will review their review and redo it, maybe with a retail unit. But if the conclusions are so strange and outlandish, it's on them to ask Apple for a new unit to confirm results or ask potential solutions . They didn't, or at least didn't bother to wait to publish their review.

My opinion.

 

[RockRock8]

Max is pushing that level of efficiency). Most of the odd 14" results could be explainable by a chip that is throttling or at least being deliberately constrained more than it should be, maybe a "hot" chip or a fan curve that isn't working right - setting it to High power mode as they did *should* have alleviated that, but there are other power curves than just the fan. We know that the 14" has historically struggled to cool the full Max chip in the past and we know occasionally Apple has shipped devices with ... imperfect cooling/power curves that had to be corrected after launch (typically iPhones more than Macs). So that's another possibility, beyond a bad/hot chip - which as you say is unlikely but possible.

And yes, the highest tier chip in a smaller body is going to not be as thermally efficient as in a larger design, I don't dispute that. But I do question how accurate all the testing is. So we wait.

But performance wise, even for M5 Pro, I suspect that is wrong for one reason or another. Whether it's incorrect testing, Cinebench being useless as usual, a bad chip, or a software update that needs to be applied to correct a bug, I think it's safe to presume the performance will be better than what they're claiming.

Again, the most of the reviews were poorly done. I keep saying it because it matters on multiple levels.

And again, fully maxed out tests hitting all CPUs and GPUs and saturating bandwidth shows M5 Max beating an M3 using nearly 2X less cores (including exactly 4X less high-performance cores), 200 GB/s less bandwidth, 4X less memory, and 2X fewer encoders. on battery. It shouldn't be possible, yet it is.

So the M5 Pro with the same cpu core counts and only 2X fewer GPU cores should not produce weird results. Lower than M5 max, but not strange results.

 

[leman]

Unfortunately very few outlets measure wall power efficiency, at most they might look at powermetrics (which is not bad data, but not complete and not useful for my purposes).

Just a quick comment on this - wall power on a battery-powered device can be problematic as well. You never know how the power manager is distributing the power draw internally. It’s best be done with a studio.