Apple M5 enters mass production on TSMC's N3P node

Apple's next-gen laptop/tablet chip, the M5, has entered mass production. This heralds its arrival in mid to late 2025, likely alongside an iPad Pro or MacBook Pro. Contrary to previous reports, it will not use TSMC's N2 node, sticking to the N3-based N3P instead. This will supposedly result in a 5% improvement in performance and up to 10% better power efficiency as compared to M4 SoCs.

While it might miss out on TSMC N2's gate-all-around tech (Nanosheets), the Apple M5 is slated to come with a bunch of other improvements, such as SoIC-mH (System-on-Integrated-Chips-holding-Horizontal) packaging. It also gets a new substrate that allows more chips to be stacked on top of each other. The article also mentions an Apple M5 Ultra chip.

Its existence has been hinted at earlier by industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo who said it will enter mass production in 2026. This marks the return of an Ultra-braded Apple chip after a two-generation hiatus. Kuo also says the Apple M5 will be the first of its kind to split the unified CPU and GPU. This is likely done to improve AI performance, which seems to be everyone's primary focus of late.