In addition to the iPhone 17 series, the most important new product in the second half of Apple may be its own developed M5 chip.
According to MacRumors, Apple will release a series of new hardware in the second half of the year: iPad Pro, iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Pro and vision Pro, and the common point is that they all use M5 series chips.
chips have become the most important protection city for Apple's ecosystem.
The Apple M5 chip is coming, a small facelift for AIThe release of Apple M1 chips has continued to be a major upgrade of the generation, and the strategy of a generation of small facelifts, such as M2 and M1 GPU improvements, but the performance improvement of M3 is not large, and the performance of M4 is also improved. According to this rule, M5 is likely to be a typical representative of the "small facelift".
(Source: Apple)
Revealed that M5 chips continue to design M4, and their overall performance is not significantly improved like M3 to M4, but they will pay more attention to optimizing AI demand and micro-tuning in many aspects, which is also in line with the direction of Apple chip AI. M5 adopts the third generation of tyrene 3 nanometer process, which is more energy-efficient than M4 chip:
CPU and GPU performance improvements by 15%~25% More advanced neural network engines, greatly improving AI computing performance Battery sustained flight increase by 10%~15%M5 Pro and M5 Ultra chips are packaged with telectrostatic SoIC-MH (2.5D stacking) to separate the CPU from the GPU and make the heat dissipation performance better.
Self-developed chips are too expensive, Apple's whole family is using them The interesting details of the Apple M5 chip are not 2 nanometers of tertiary power, or perhaps it is to control costs.
(Source: TEK)
As we all know, chips are a industry with heavy R&D and long return cycles. The R&D costs of each generation of M chips are as high as billion US dollars, but the advantage is only one or two years. This is a high cost that cannot be ignored for Mac products with far less sales than iPhones.
Handel Jones, chief executive officer of International Business Strategies (IBS), once said that the cost of advanced chip development is 28 nm, and the average cost of 28 nm is US$40 million; 7 nm is US$217 million, 5 nm is US$416 million, and 3 nm is US$59 million.
Digital production costs are not cheap either. Take the M1 series chips as an example, the cost is about $50, the M1 Pro is about $100, the M1 Max with a larger chip surface is as high as $200, and the M1 Ultra costs up to $500 due to stacking design. It’s not difficult to understand why Apple didn’t recommend the M4 Ultra chip because it’s actually too expensive!
Such a huge R&D cost is not only a source of competition, but also a heavy burden for Apple. The M-series chips that start with a 5-nanometer process represent a expenditure of more than one billion US dollars each time the process is improved. In order to maintain thin and high-magnitude chip development costs, Apple has introduced more product lines to the M series chips, and the biggest cash cow is the iPad.
As early as 2020, Apple launched the iPad Pro with M1 chips, and continued to promote the use of M-series chips for iPad product lines. Currently, the iPad Air and iPad Pro series are equipped with M-series chips with full-line prices, and the price is naturally high.
In 2023, Apple released space computing equipment Vision Pro, which is an M2 chip, drives complex space computing; iPad Pro first released the M4 series chip in 2024; later, we saw more Mac computers equipped with M4 series chips and Mac Studio equipped with M3 Ultra processors, which can directly run the bloody DeepSeek-R1 model, and you can see that the Apple "Family Bucket" strategy will continue. On the one hand, in order to divide the cost, and on the other hand, it is also to build a high wall, so that the opponent's counterattack time will be shorter and shorter.