Apple announced its latest 14-inch MacBook Pro laptop overnight, alongside the latest iPad Pro range, powered by the new M5 system on a chip (SoC). As you’d expect, Apple made claims of increased performance, particularly in terms of graphically intensive and AI-based workloads. But how much more powerful is the new MacBook Pro versus last year’s model?
At this stage, only the 14-inch variant comes with Apple’s latest silicon. For the time being, the 16-inch MacBook Pro still uses the high-powered M4 Pro and M4 Max chipsets from last year. From a technical perspective, those SoCs are more powerful, albeit more expensive, while the M5 aims to be more efficient.
Case in point, the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro houses 10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine. Meanwhile, the M4 Max variant supports up to 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores.
Compared to the M4 chipset, however, the M5 boasts up to 3.5 times faster AI performance, 1.6 times faster graphics, and an SSD that’s twice as fast. So, how does Apple measure AI performance? Here’s what the footnotes on Apple’s website say:
Time to first token measured with a 16K token prompt using an 8 billion parameter model with 4-bit weights and FP16 activations, mlx-lm and prerelease MLX framework.
That’s a lot of tech jargon to absorb. To break it down further, OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, describes a token as being roughly equal to four characters, with 100 tokens on par with 75 words written in English. In other words, Apple’s test consists of using a long 12,000-word prompt with various other parameters thrown in the mix.
It’s a repeatable test suited to benchmarking, but AI workloads don’t consist entirely of text-based large language model tasks. Apple doesn’t quite go into as much detail with its graphics performance claims beyond “up to 1.6x higher frame rates in games compared to the M4 model”. Still, that’s a reasonable year-on-year boost to claim, alongside up to 24 hours of battery life.
Apple M5 MacBook Pro price and release date
Starting at $2,499 in Australia, the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro arrives in stores on 22 October. It’s available to pre-order online now, with only a short wait until the laptop launches locally.
The post Just how much more powerful is the new M5 MacBook Pro? appeared first on GadgetGuy.
0 (mga) komento:
Mag-post ng isang Komento