MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

Post by danielxt » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

kobalsky wrote: post #289

dawnerd wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 32gb m1 max was probably the best purchase I've made. Still plenty of headroom in performance left in this beast. Wonder what reason they'll use to end software support in the future. Bet it'll be some security hardware they make up for the sake of forcing upgrades.

my tinfoil hat theory is that they make small features depend on new hardware. for example, let's say the new os depends on m5's exclusive thumbnail generator accelerator, and let's say it improves speed by a 20%. now, your M1 notebook than on previous OSes uses standard gpu acceleration for thumbnails will not have this specialized hardware acceleration, it will have software fallback that will be 90% slower. you wo…

Post by case540 » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

tux3 wrote: post #322

azinman2 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems very reasonable to me

A bit strange to use time to first token instead of throughput. Latency to the first token is not like a web page where first paint already has useful things to show. The first token is "The ", and you'll be very happy it's there in 50ms instead of 200ms... but then what you really want to know is how quickly you'll get the rest of the sentence (throughput)

Post by abhikul0 » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

anentropic wrote: post #264

fotcorn wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The memory bandwith on M4 Max is 546 GB/s, M5 Max is 614GB/s, so not a huge jump. The new tensor cores, sorry, "Neural Accelerator" only really help with prompt preprocessing aka prefill, and not with token generation. Token generation is memory bound. Hopefully the Ultra version (if it exists) has a bigger jump in memory bandwidth and maximum RAM.

Do any frameworks manage to use the neural engine cores for that? Most stuff ends up running Metal -> GPU I thought

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

whizzter wrote: post #329

pjmlp wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which majority? I certainly only use Macs when being project assigned, then there are plenty of developers out there whose job has nothing to do with what Apple offers. Also while Metal is a very cool API, I rather play with Vulkan, CUDA and DirectX, as do the large majority of game developers.

Honestly though, gamedevs really are among the biggest Windows stalwarts due to SDK's and older 3d software. Only groups of developers more tied to Windows that I can think of are probably embedded people tied due to weird hardware SDK's and Windows Active Directory dependent enterprise people. Outside of that almost everyone hip seems to want a Mac.

Post by mixtureoftakes » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

abiraja wrote: post #234

I just bought a M5 Macbook Pro 2 weeks ago. Thinking of returning it and getting a M5 Pro with the same configuration but only $200 more. How should I compare M5 vs M5 Pro?