Lemire breaks down Apple M2 to M5: a 30% clock boost explains most of the gains
lemire · x · 2026-09-19
Daniel Lemire published an 8-part thread dissecting where Apple's base-silicon gains from M2 (2022) to M5 (2025) come from:
- Clock speed: M5 raised frequency 30%, which alone explains the bulk of the uplift; even normalized for clock, M5 is clearly faster than M2.
- Transistors: M2→M4 transistor count grew 40% (M5 data unavailable), going into more cores and units.
- IPC: M4 cores can theoretically sustain 10 instructions per cycle, ahead of most competitors.
- Memory bandwidth: M5's much higher bandwidth pays off in multicore workloads, where bandwidth is the usual bottleneck.
- Data parallelism: AMD Zen 5 has four 512-bit SIMD units vs Apple's four 128-bit units — a 4x gap; M4/M5's novelty is the new 512-bit SME matrix unit.
Related event: Apple M2 to M5: Only ~50% Gains Over Three Years, Mostly From Clock Speed(2 posts)→
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