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The big difference you're not looking at is the memory bandwidth. The M5 Pro has nearly twice the one of the M6:

170GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 32GB unified memory

307GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 64GB unified memory

That is also the factor you want to take into account for AI inference, of course.

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Both are still very low for AI btw.
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Yep, even 600GB/s is barely usable and not fun.
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Well, “low” is relative. Not everyone can spend a small car’s worth on a Studio…
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But everyone can load 10 bucks on a deepseek flash API and have almost unlimited usage at decent speed.
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you're looking at the wrong device.

- Apple M5 Ultra chip

- 30-core CPU with 10 super cores and 20 performance cores

- 64-core GPU

- Neural Accelerators

- Hardware-accelerated ray tracing

- 32-core Neural Engine

- 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth

one point 2 terrabyte a second memory bandwidth....

512gb coming later this year

but at the cost of a small car

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Last time the benchmark numbers from apple were stupid and they still are.

I just wait for practical real live numbers with real stacks i use.

And btw. they reduced the memory bandwdith on the M4 in comparision to its previous version by 40gb/sec or so, you need to wait to see.

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It basically means that every meaningful comparison produced an embarrassing improvement multiplier
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Benchmarks from the manufacturer are just marketing as well. Wait for independent 3rd party reviews.
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Upgraded my work machine from an M1 MBP to an M4 Mac Mini a couple of years ago. I do a lot of work in Excel with large sheets. The performance improvement was very noticeable and appreciated!
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https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-m6-a...

Says 1.2x for multithreaded and doesn't specify (I presume smaller) for single-threaded. That's compared to M5 not M5 Pro, so M5 Pro is likely significantly faster.

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