In the midst of the whirlwind of news this week, Apple renamed its CPU cores. At Six Colors, Jason Snell has the details:
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.