Mike Wuerthele
South Korean media claims that Apple Silicon M5 chips are in mass production, which makes a lot of sense considering that the first devices that will use them are expected ship before the end of 2025.
A report on Wednesday morning by South Korean venue ETnews says that TSMC is in the process of packaging early M5 chip production. Packaging is the last step before a new chip can be put in devices, meaning that the M5 chip is now officially in mass production.
Rumors have already laid out the timetable for the M5 chip, and appearance in Apple products. The M5 iPad Pro is expected in late 2025, Macs will get M5 late in the year, and another rumor places it in a second-generation Apple Vision Pro product before the end of the year.
The chip has already been spotted in code, too. As early as August 2023, identifiers for the M5 were spotted in CHIP tags, intended to ensure that firmware is not installed onto the incompatible hardware, among other tasks.
The M5 chip is expected to retain about the same architecture as the M1 through M4 chips, with the GPU and CPU on the same die. However, M5 Pro is rumored to split the design for the first time.
The M5 Pro and other chips are said to use manufacturer TSMC's latest chip packaging process. Called the System-in-Integrated-Chips-Molding-Horizontal (SoIC-mH). It's not clear if the core M5 uses this packaging process.
Mass production is expected in the second half of 2025 for the M5 Pro and the M5 Max, and then 2026 for the M5 Ultra. In December, it was theorized that the M5 has reportedly been in the prototyping phrase for a few months, with mass production is believed to be planned for the first half of 2025.
Other reports on Wednesday have indicated that Apple's chip partner TSMC is working on a 1nm process. This is also an obvious report, given the company's pre-existing roadmap.
It's not likely that the M5 will be manufactured with that 1nm process. Instead, the M5 processor is said to be produced by TSMC using its N3P technology, which is expected to be seen first in the iPhone 18 range.
This all said, ETnews has a good track record about Apple's supply chain moves. It has a notably poorer one when predicting timelines or product specifics from those details.
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12 Comments
Be still my heart but honestly Mac Studio is still on M2 Ultra so would not Apple be better off rolling out scaled socs for the high margin devices?
Perhaps they are skipping generations due to observ d ai related market trends
So far, we're not seeing evidence of any M4 chips having interconnects like M1/M2 Ultra uses. Maybe that's why they're doing M5 that is optimized for interconnects?
The number of Star Trek jokes about the M5 are about to escalate! ;)
"This unit must survive.
" - M5, Star Date 2268
The M-5 multitronic unit, or the M-5 computer, was an advanced multitronic computer system and prototype created by DoctorRichard Daystrom during the mid-23rd century. M-5 was installed on board the USS Enterprise in 2268 as a test of its capabilities. The M-5 drills were designed to allow the unit to command and control the ship during several exploration simulations and war games.