Overview
- macOS Tahoe 26.3.1 updates System Information and Activity Monitor to label existing M5 performance cores as “super” cores, reflecting a naming change without altering behavior.
- M5 Pro and M5 Max adopt Apple’s new Fusion Architecture that bonds two dies, with a common die for the 18-core CPU, 16-core Neural Engine, SSD controller, and Thunderbolt, and a second die that scales GPU, media engines, and memory bandwidth.
- The new CPU layout features six super cores for peak single‑thread speed and 12 new performance cores tuned for multithreaded throughput, replacing efficiency cores in the Pro/Max chips.
- Apple says unified memory is preserved across the fused dies, though it has not disclosed detailed mechanisms for cross‑die memory access or potential latency tradeoffs.
- Apple adds a Neural Accelerator to every GPU core and claims up to 4x AI compute without increasing GPU core counts, with memory bandwidth rising to 307 GB/s (M5 Pro) and 614 GB/s (M5 Max).