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)→
More from Embodied
- What are we actually seeing with GPT-6 Astra? A skeptic's look at the robotics results — GeorgiaChal · 2026-09-19
- Apple M6 bumps cores to 12 with two super cores; CPUs keep improving fast — lemire · 2026-09-19
- NVIDIA Opens 2027 Applied Research Internships on Humanoid Robots (Isaac Loco-Manipulation) — YuXiang_IRVL · 2026-09-19
- Jev vs GPT-6 Astra: testing model-controlled robot arms in MuJoCo — const_reborn · 2026-09-19
- Polymarket gives OpenAI 54% odds of launching a consumer hardware product by end of 2026 — Polymarket · 2026-09-19
- 3 Franka arms stack 9-block tower with Gemini Robotics-ER as VLA brain — Zergylord · 2026-09-19