Apple gives in to temptation and renames its CPU cores

One of the most surprising parts of Apple’s announcement on Tuesday of new M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models was its decision to change how it describes the two different types of CPU cores in its processors.

What’s in a name? It’s really a marketing decision, more than anything else. And most people will not care, or even notice. But those of us who pay close attention to this stuff will notice, and you may be hearing about it from us for some time to come.

Here’s what happened:

Apple renamed its most powerful CPU cores, which had previously been called performance cores. As of the M5 Pro and Max, those cores are now called “super cores.”

Surprise! Since those cores also shipped in the M5 MacBook Pro, M5 iPad Pro, and M5 Vision Pro, they have all been retroactively renamed as super cores. I am writing this very story on a device that sports four super cores, but I didn’t even know that until I heard the news early Tuesday morning.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max chips also feature the debut of a brand-new core design derived from the super core design. (I assume the efficiency cores in the base M5 were probably the same cores that Apple used in the M4.) This new core design is still power efficient, but it can offer high performance in multithreaded tasks. In the past, the second-tier core was referred to as an efficiency core, but Apple has decided that these new ones are better described as performance cores. In other words, Batman has become Superman and Robin (or is it Supergirl?) has become Batman.

Here’s the backstory: With every new generation of Apple’s Mac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs that they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that their “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count of the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where they’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actually, the lesser cores on an M-series chip are quite fast on their own, in addition to being very good at saving power!

Clearly they’ve had enough of that, so they’re changing how Apple’s second-tier cores are marketed to emphasize their performance, rather than their efficiency. Which is fine on its face, but by re-using an existing term of art, it’s going to be a bit confusing when it comes time to explain what’s going on. I wonder if Apple should’ve come up with two different names for these cores, rather than recycling one of them.

Leaving the naming aside, a new secondary core design is actually great news. Apple doesn’t iterate every aspect of its chips every time, but chooses different bits to upgrade—and the power-efficient cores got the big update with the high-end M5 generation. The “super” cores really are meant to be used for peak workloads, and a huge amount of the everyday life of a Mac doesn’t need to tap that power. Also, presumably these new cores will also crop up on the base M6 chips next year, making them appreciably better than the base M5.

In the end, I suspect this is entirely a marketing issue: Apple didn’t think the lesser of the two core types was getting its due, and I understand why. In a few years maybe none of us will flinch when we read about a chip with so many super cores and so many performance cores. Not today, though.

One last, tangential observation: Apple announced its new Fusion Architecture today as well, which allows the company to mix and match different “chiplets” in a single package. This is another esoteric chip thing (is there any other kind?) but it has real ramifications for the future of Apple’s chip designs. It means that Apple can be a bit more modular with its designs, building a standard CPU set (for the M5 Max and Pro) while offering two different GPU variants with 20 (Pro) and 40 (Max) cores. I’m also curious what this means for a future Ultra chip, assuming there will be one whenever the M5 Mac Studio is announced.