I suspect it has depended a bit on whether a new process has lower output or higher defects. High defects, they'll focus on smaller baseline chips to get better yields. Low output, they'll launch pro models first because those are lower volume. Neither problem, they'll roll out updates pretty quickly across multiple product lines.

And that should change going forward with smaller chiplets being integrated in package, vs huge Ultra chips.

Pro chips come much later than base chips and vary significantly in ways other than number of cores (which can be up to double), such as doubled memory bandwidth and peripheral support (thunderbolt 5 instead of 4).

You mean as in binning? High defect rates for chips but they're burned to disable non-working parts and sell them as non-pro chips and accumulate the good ones ?

As others have said, the pro is a different mask set.

But you are right, they do bin. You can get versions of the cpu with different core counts for this reason.

I’m only seeing this with the pro and max though.

If you look at the platform name and the kernel code you'l realize that this is not even remotely true. The base M chips are T8xxx which are (more or less) just iPad chips. The pro/max/ultra are T6xxx and are their own new thing, starting with M1 pro which was T6000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon#Comparison_of_M-...

Curious, where's 5 come from? Is there a reason for the specific guess or is it just an example?