M5 deep dive: What the hell is a super core?

I am two things by nature: Fascinated by new processor technology and wary of marketing BS. So Apple’s got me all kinds of triggered with its new branding stunt.

In case you missed it, the M5 Pro and M5 Max announcement came with some new buzzwords. One is “Fusion Architecture,” which is Apple’s branding for a chip with multiple silicon dies on a high-speed interconnect. They’re not the first to do this, but it does use a new packaging technology. AMD has been doing this kind of thing for years, really, but it’s new to Apple.

What really got me was the other new buzzword, “super cores.” Oh, the M5 Pro and Max don’t have “performance and efficiency” cores anymore. They have “performance and super cores.”

What exactly is a super core? Is it a core with a massive L2 cache? Far more than usual execution units? Support for some special instruction set extensions?

No, it turns out it’s just the same performance cores they’ve already been shipping. Apple openly admits that it has renamed the performance cores in its M5 products—including the M5 iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, and Vision Pro that have been shipping for months—to “super cores.”

(As I write this, Apple hasn’t updated the tech specs pages for the iPad Pro or Vision Pro just yet, but it has on the regular M5 MacBook Pro page. So those updates are presumably coming.)

So the M5’s performance cores are now super cores, but according to Apple, it’s the same thing with a different name. I guess Apple wasn’t getting enough respect for having some of the highest single-thread benchmark performance out there.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max each have six of these super cores, significantly fewer than the 10 performance cores in the M4 Pro and the 12 performance cores in the M4 Max. Furthermore, the M5 Pro and Max chips also have 12 “performance cores,” which presumably are not just rebranded efficiency cores. They are, according to Apple’s release, a totally new thing. Even in the M5 MacBook Pro spec sheet, Apple makes a distinction between efficiency cores (on the M5) and performance cores (on the M5 Pro/Max).

Apple

So if these new performance cores are not the old efficiency cores with a new name, and they’re not the old performance cores (which have become super cores), then what are they?

Apple only says they are “optimized to deliver greater power-efficient, multithreaded performance for pro workloads,” which to me sounds like it’s just a new efficiency core design, and Apple is so proud of it that they started calling them “performance cores.”

It doesn’t help that so much of the marketing around these MacBook Pros is geared toward comparisons with the M1 generation. It’s been 4.5 years—of course the M5 is a lot faster.

None of this is to say that the chips are bad, or slow. I expect when we review them, we’ll find a surprisingly big uplift compared to the M4 generation, just as we did when we reviewed the M5 MacBook Pro. So why play word games with marketing the chips?

Are “super cores” coming to other Apple products? You can bet on it. Don’t be surprised when the A20 shows up with two super cores and four “performance cores.” Why stop there? Maybe in a couple more years, we can have ultra cores?