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aurareturn

Whoah, both the Pro and Max CPUs feature 18 cores. This hasn't happened since M1 Pro/Max. This is a surprise.

Also, the mix of cores have changed drastically.

- 6 "Super cores"

- 12 "Performance cores"

I'm guessing these are just renamed performance and efficiency cores from previous generations.

This is a massive change from the M4 Max:

- 12 performance cores

- 4 efficiency cores

This seems like a downgrade (in core config but may not be in actual MT) assuming super = performance and performance = efficiency cores.

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I don't think the "new" Performance cores are just "renamed" "E" / "Efficiency" cores; Apple has retroactively renamed the baseline M5 nomenclature to say it has "10-core CPU with 4 super cores and 6 efficiency cores"; so they're clearly keeping the "efficiency cores" nomenclature around.

I think this is a new design, with Apple having three tiers of cores now, similar to what Qualcomm has been doing for a while.

I think how it breaks down is:

- "Super" are the old "P" cores, and the top tier cores now

- "Performance" cores are a new tier and seen for the first time here, slotting between "old" P and E in performance

- "Efficiency" / "E" are still going to be around; but maybe not in desktop/Pro/Max anymore.

Interesting. This is clearly a big CPU change if so. I wonder why no E cores. I’m sure E cores would be more efficient at OS tasks than the new performance cores.

For example, 6 super, 8 performance, and 4 efficiency.

Another commenter stated the P cores can be scaled down to be E cores dynamically, so why not?

P cores would take up more die space.

I wonder if they'll get to good enough scaling from E to Super where they don't really need to distinguish anymore?

There's still a difference when it comes to die size and transistor counts dedicated between the two core types.

I think super cores are a new type/tier of core, not a rename of performance.

The base M5 has super/efficiency cores.

The Pro and Max have super/performance cores.

  Whoah, both the Pro and Max CPUs feature 18 cores. This hasn't happened since M1 Pro/Max. This is a surprise.

Replying to my own post. In hindsight, this shouldn't be any surprise because these chips are now chiplets. Apple is connecting a CPU die with a GPU die. This means they're designing just one CPU die rather than two. An Ultra would just be two of these CPU dies.

I was looking into this. The M5 performance cores can be scaled down to match efficiency cores in performance and power usage.

I believe they lower the clock speed, limit how much work is done in parallel on each core, and limit how aggressive the speculative execution is so less work is wasted.

  The M5 performance cores can be scaled down to match efficiency cores in performance and power usage.

Source for this?

Not sure if this was available in previous gens but my M4 Pro can run in low power mode. It's amazing. I can work for hours and only use 10-15% of the battery.

So they renamed performance to mean efficiency and are now using super in place of performance?

Super is old "performance" core:

> The industry-leading super core was first introduced as performance cores in M5, which also adopts the super core name for all M5-based products

But new "performance" is claimed to be new design (= not just overclocked efficiency core from M5?):

> M5 Pro and M5 Max also introduce an all-new performance core that is optimized to deliver greater power-efficient, multithreaded performance for pro workloads.

quotes from https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-debuts-m5-pro-a...

Intel is totally gonna steal that. They're catching so much flak for their "efficiency cores" I'm surprised they haven't done a rebrand yet

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