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aurareturn 9 hours ago

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.

▲ klausa 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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aurareturn 8 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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NetMageSCW 8 hours ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	bombcar 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I wonder if they'll get to good enough scaling from E to Super where they don't really need to distinguish anymore?
	▲	aurareturn 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		P cores would take up more die space.

▲ Havoc 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲ aurareturn 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

  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.

▲ netruk44 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲ jacobp100 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	aurareturn 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		`The M5 performance cores can be scaled down to match efficiency cores in performance and power usage.` Source for this?

▲ 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲ cced 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	petu 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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...
	▲	9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]