New M5 MacBook Air Benchmarks Leak
The new MacBook Air with the M5 chip shows a substantial performance leap over the M4 generation in early benchmarks. The scores indicate significant gains in single-core, multi-core, and especially GPU performance. This boost makes the new Air a more viable machine for local development and AI/ML workloads, potentially rivaling previous Pro-tier devices.
The leaked Geekbench 6 scores for the M5 MacBook Air show a single-core result of 4190 and a multi-core score of 17073. This represents a roughly 9.3% single-core and 13.6% multi-core performance increase over the M4 generation, which scored around 3832 and 15034, respectively. This performance jump is partially attributed to a modest clock speed increase to 4.46GHz from the M4's 4.41GHz and an increase in L2 cache from 4MB to 6MB. The underlying M5 system-on-a-chip is fabricated using a third-generation 3-nanometer process technology. A significant architectural shift in the M5 is the integration of Neural Accelerators directly into each core of the 10-core GPU. This new design allows the GPU to deliver over four times the peak compute performance for AI-specific tasks compared to the M4 chip. The chip's unified memory bandwidth has also been increased by nearly 30% to 153GB/s, up from the M4's 120GB/s. Apple's own machine learning framework, MLX, demonstrates that this increased bandwidth provides a 19-27% performance boost for local large language model inference on the M5 versus the M4. For developers running local AI workloads, this translates to tangible speed improvements. In specific tests, the M5 has demonstrated up to 3.8x faster image generation with diffusion models compared to the M4. The new Air's multi-core performance (17,073) now surpasses that of older MacBook Pro models equipped with the M3 Pro chip, which averages a score of 15,260. Meanwhile, the higher-tier M5 Max chip has benchmarked with a multi-core score of 29,233, exceeding the performance of the M3 Ultra chip found in the Mac Studio.
