Apple, via Newsroom, on Day 2 of its “big week”:

Apple today announced M5 Pro and M5 Max, the world’s most advanced chips for pro laptops, powering the new MacBook Pro. The chips are built using a new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture. This innovative design combines two dies into a single system on a chip (SoC), which includes a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities. M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a new 18-core CPU architecture. It includes six of the highest-performing core design, now called super cores, that are the world’s fastest CPU core. Alongside these cores are 12 all-new performance cores, optimized for power-efficient, multithreaded workloads.

These are ridiculously powerful SoCs, to the point where even the putative “power-efficient” cores are so fast that Apple found it necessary to promote them from mere “efficiency” cores to “performance,” necessitating a new name—super cores—for the speed-at-all-costs cores:

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 — MacBook Air, the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro. This core is the highest-performance core design with the world’s fastest single-threaded performance, driven in part by increased front-end bandwidth, a new cache hierarchy, and enhanced branch prediction.

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.

I’ll admit, retconning the M5’s “performance cores” as “super cores” is a baller move. Does this count as a free hardware upgrade?

The rename has caused some confusion; John Gruber at Daring Fireball attempts to clarify:

There are now three core types in M5-series CPUs. Efficiency cores are still “efficiency”, but they’re only in the base M5. What used to be called “performance” cores are now called “super” cores, and they’re present in all M5 chips. The new core type — more power-efficient than super cores, more performant than efficiency cores — are taking the old name “performance”.

Got it?

• M5: efficiency cores are still efficiency cores.
• M5 Pro and M5 Max: cores formerly known as efficiency are now performance cores.
• M5-series: cores formerly known as performance are now super cores.

How I interpret what Apple is saying: Our previously “high-performance, high power” cores are now so power-efficient, we can make them the “low power” cores, and introduce a new, even higher-performance core above it.

(Plus, “efficiency” has a faint whiff of compromise: images of brawny chips forcibly constrained and compelled to sip power come to mind.)

M5 Pro is designed to meet the needs of pro users — like data modelers, post-production sound designers, and STEM students — who require robust processing power and graphics, and ample amounts of unified memory to handle complex projects and workloads. […]

M5 Max is designed for pro users — such as 3D animators, app developers, and AI researchers — who run workloads that demand maximum GPU compute and the highest unified memory bandwidth.

Even in my previous life this much unadulterated power would have been overkill—not that it would have stopped me.