Apple M5 Max and M5 Pro appear on Geekbench AI, sporting 20% higher scores compared to predecessors
Apple's M5 Pro and Max debuted just a few days ago, and early benchmarks have already started seeping in. The chips clearly demonstrate promising GPU and CPU performance improvements over its predecessors, with the 18-core CPU found in the M5 Max and Pro defeating nearly every consumer-grade x86 chip on the planet.
The GPU performance does leave a lot to be desired, with the M5 Max trading blows with the RTX 5070 Laptop GPU in Geekbench OpenCL and the M5 Pro barely managing to keep up with a mid-range RTX 5060 Laptop GPU in the same test. Of course, OpenCL is no longer optimized on macOS, which definitely has a role to play in the somewhat disappointing results.
Apart from raw CPU and GPU performance, Geekbench can also test on-device AI performance. Due to the differences of APIs between macOS and the platforms, making cross-platform comparisons would not be quite fair. However, we can compare the M5 Pro and Max families with their predecessors, in order to get an idea as to just how much Apple has improved in that regard.
The results for the M5 Max SoC in the Geekbench AI test are as follows:
| Single-precision | Half-precision | Quantized | |
|---|---|---|---|
| M5 Max Neural Engine | 5,100 | 44,000 | 58,000 |
| M5 Max CPU | 5,000 | 8,700 | 7,000 |
| M5 Max GPU | 27,000 | 43,100 | 41,000 |
| M5 Pro Neural Engine | 5,000 | 44,000 | 57,500 |
| M5 Pro CPU | 5,000 | 8,700 | 7,011 |
| M5 Pro GPU | 20,200 | 35,000 | 34,000 |
Compared to the M4 Max, the M5 Max GPU seemingly commands a roughly 20% lead in single-precision. The improvement for the M5 Pro GPU over the M4 Pro is also around 20% as well.
Interestingly, the CPU scores have not changed much at all, and the scores for the 16-core neural engine are actually much worse in single-precision, which simply does not make any sense. However, the scores in half-precision and quantized tests have improved roughly by 15% and 10%.
Moreover, it should be mentioned that the previous variants also hosted a 16-core Neural Engine as well. Apple does mention that the new Neural Engine is faster, but not by how much. The vanilla M5 (14" MacBook Pro currently $1,450 on Amazon), M5 Pro, and M5 Max SoCs all feature the same 16-core Neural Engine.
Needless to say, these are very early numbers, and it is possible that Geekbench AI is not yet able to take advantage of the M5 generation's neural accelerators inside each GPU core. Apple claims up to 4x faster performance in AI workloads, but the current benchmarks clearly tell a different story.
Considering that a single benchmark is far from representative of real-world performance, the actual AI performance of the M5 Pro and M5 Max SoCs can only be established after independent reviews with real-life workloads.
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