Testing Apple's 2026 16-inch MacBook Pro, M5 Max, and its new "performance" cores
By Andrew Cunningham
Published on March 9, 2026.
Apple's M5 Pro and M5 Max have made significant changes to Apple's high-end laptop and desktop chips, with the chips now being packaged together using an "all-new Fusion Architecture" that splits CPU and GPU cores into one piece of silicon. The new chips use fewer Apple's "efficiency" CPU cores and use a third type of CPU core instead, also known as "performance" cores. The M5 family’s large high-performance cores are now called “super” cores, including those that originally launched as “performance” in the regular M5 last fall. Despite these changes, Apple's single-core performance is about 10 percent higher than the fully enabled version of the M4 Max in last year's 16-inch MacBook Pro. Multi-core improvements are more variable, but most tests also show a modest 10 or 12 percent improvement. Graphics performance improvements are slightly more robust, suggesting an uplift on GPU compute workloads that can benefit from the neural accelerator Apple has built into each M5-family GPU core. The design for the new MacBook Pros is aging well and we still like it.
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