- Apple shifts chip power from CPUs to GPUs and memory for better balance
- Efficiency Plateaus for CPUs While GPU and Neural Engine Performance Soars
- MacBook Pros redefine performance around sustained workloads, not raw CPU speed
Apple’s custom silicon has evolved rapidly since the launch of its first M1 processor in 2020, the first chip that marked Apple’s transition from Intel and focused heavily on CPU efficiency.
The power balance began to change with the arrival of the M1 Pro and M1 Max in 2021, where the GPU consumed a much larger portion of the chip’s total power.
The M2 generation largely followed that trend, but the M3 Max increased the CPU frequency and power limits, putting more budget on the CPU in mobile systems, before the balance shifted back to the GPU and memory.
Inside Apple Silicon: Part Five of a Five-Part Series on M-Class Processors
This article is the last in a five-part series delving into Apple’s M-class processors, from the first M1s to the recently announced M5 and our projected M5 Ultra. Each piece explores how Apple silicon has evolved in architecture, performance, and design philosophy, and what those changes could mean for the company’s future hardware.
M4 goes to the maximum
When the M4 Max arrived in 2024, adding Thunderbolt 5 to the Mac for the first time, the CPU was no longer the main consumer of thermal space.
Early M1 designs dedicated approximately 18W to 25W of their power budget to the CPU. The rest went to graphics and memory bandwidth.
The M1 Max consumed around 115W in total, but only 25W for its CPU cores. Estimates suggest that the M4 Max CPU consumes around 48W within a roughly 70W chip, with Apple allocating substantial power to graphics and memory bandwidth.
The new generation M5, which launched a week ago and powers the new 14-inch MacBook Pro and new iPad Pro, has a CPU that draws a maximum of 15W from 25W.
While there’s no telling when an M5 Max might see the light of day (there was a nearly six-month gap between the M4 and the M4 Pro and Max), that version is likely to increase the overall power of the chip, but without a big increase in CPU consumption.
Data estimates generated by Google Gemini, based on past Apple chip trends, suggest that the CPU will use around 50W of an overall 95W design, almost identical to the M4 Max’s ratio.
Apple’s power increase appears to have reached a point where the CPU cores are efficient enough that adding power to the mix provides minimal benefit.
Multi-core CPU benchmark scores have increased relatively modestly from 13,188 on the M1 Max to 25,000 on the M4 Max.
Meanwhile, GPU performance has increased from around 112,000 on the M1 Max to an estimate of over 200,000 for the projected M5 Max.
The Neural Engine has jumped from 11 TOPS in the first M1 to about 133 TOPS in the new M5, supported by Apple Intelligence on the device, and Gemini projections suggest around 400 TOPS for the future M5 Max.
Instead of chasing maximum CPU output, Apple is optimizing sustained mixed workloads that combine CPU, GPU, and AI processing, ultimately reshaping what we consider a professional MacBook.
For creative and machine learning tasks, the reward comes from how efficiently the chip moves data and balances power, rather than how fast a single core runs.
In Apple’s entry-level M5, the CPU has reached a point of mature efficiency and the true cost of performance now falls on the GPU and memory system.
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