I use pizza to describe Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max — and now I’m convinced that laptops are about to change
As inevitable as the day turns to night, the latest Apple silicon tests are leaking on Geekbench. This time, it’s the M5 Max revealed and as you’d expect, it’s an absolute beast.
But it’s easy to see the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros as “big numbers going up” — I mean, that’s exactly what my friends were thinking when I tried to explain the new architecture changes while sharing a pizza.
“So, what’s the big deal?” Ben asked (with an inappropriate amount of tomato sauce in his mouth). Then I looked at the piece I was holding, and it hit me.
Apple calls it “Fusion Architecture,” and this is a key moment where the company stopped trying to make a giant pizza, but instead created a buffet. This isn’t just a small change, it’s a productivity leap that changes the way your computer thinks from a single brain to a hive mind that can grow as the buffet allows.
Why the monolith had to die
Intel is calling it “chips in a system” for its Core Ultra Series 3 chips — whatever it’s called, this is the direction everyone is headed. And in trying to explain this to my friends, I went to one dish that I always think about.
Imagine you are making a pizza. As many people love the pepperoni special that you make, you should grow bigger. But you can only make the sweetest ‘za before it goes out of the oven, or the middle stays green while the crust burns.
Traditionally, Apple Silicon has always been a system on a chip (SoC): everything (CPU, GPU and RAM) in one big pizza. Good for efficiency, but limited in scalability.
Chipmakers can’t print a single chip larger than a certain size without it being incredibly bulky and expensive. There is a scaling problem (about 858mm-squared based on the high exposure area of lithography machines that make chips) and a manufacturing quality problem:
- You he can keep making the dough bigger, but your pizza oven is a fixed size.
- If you have a 5-foot monster pizza and hair falling on it, you have to throw everything away.
So instead of trying to make one impossible pizza, Apple decided to make four perfect 12-inch pizzas and “combine” them together in one large serving platter.
With the M5 Pro and M5 Max, the Cupertino team went back to the drawing board and rewrote the rules for chips on system (CoS). Instead of just putting it all together, many special chips are put together to form one thing – tightly bound together so the software thinks it’s still one chip.
- It is much better for efficiency – if one pizza is like hair, you only need to throw that small piece
- You still get that size advantage — you can still feed the masses a ton of pizza
- The magic of Fusion Architecture — the “crust” on these pizzas is so fast that the person eating it (the software) can’t even tell that they are different pizzas
Intel was the first major chipmaker to jump into this with the Core Ultra Series 3, and it not only made silicon production more efficient for them, as you can see from the numbers, but also brought efficiency/energy efficiency with it.
And in Apple’s case, you can see how the bottom of the chip of the M5 Pro has been raised, the ceiling of what the MacBook Pro can do has effectively doubled, and the design is now future-proof with simplicity (all they need to do for the “M5 Ultra” in the end is simply put more blocks in it).
M5 Max: by numbers
So how does this fusion structure work? We have a strong opinion on this Geekbench CPU score test.
That’s a 5.3% increase in single-core and a 13% jump in multi-core speed. With this lens, it’s a bit of a leap, but then you take a step back and realize that it’s actually faster than the M3 Ultra – Apple’s current desktop beast found in Mac Studio.
Intel Core Ultra Series 3 is the same, where the increase in CPU speed is very small. But it’s in the GPU where you’ll see the biggest gains. As you have already seen with Team Blue, Apple proposes an increase in critical performance – all thanks to all 40 GPU cores with a neural accelerator in them:
- 50% image efficiency.
- 4x faster LLM prompts (making Siri and local AI feel faster)
- 3x faster video rendering in DaVinci Resolve (since the GPU is now AI-aware)
Also, shout out to a 20% improvement in memory bandwidth to make things much faster, and a claimed 2x improvement in SSD speed to 14.5 GB/s.
Future Modular
Earlier this year, I went to an Intel event where they broke down the architecture of the Core Ultra Series 3 by giving everyone a Lego set to build the chip. I thought this was weird at first (not a problem — love Lego), but the further we get into this year, the more I think it’s a perfect analogy.
We are entering the era of silicon Lego. This whole idea of waiting for one big chip is over, because the future is about how well you can combine smaller chips. For the past few generations, Apple has focused on making a “pizza” denser (from TSMC’s 4nm process to 3nm in chip manufacturing).
But we’ve reached a point where ingredients can’t be made smaller without things getting weird at the subatomic level. So by moving to chips in the system, M5 Pro and Max broke the wall of the oven – it is not limited how big one pizza can be, but only how many can stick together.
As I’ve been saying, 2026 is a big year of change for laptops – with a big change happening at the core of each system. And now that the ceiling is gone, the sky’s the limit for how far these performance benefits can go.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling hungry.
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