Posts tagged with "mlx"

I Finally Tested the M5 iPad Pro’s Neural-Accelerated AI, and the Hype Is Real

The M5 iPad Pro.

The M5 iPad Pro.

The best kind of follow-up article isn’t one that clarifies a topic that someone got wrong (although I do love that, especially when that “someone” isn’t me); it’s one that provides more context to a story that was incomplete. My M5 iPad Pro review was an incomplete narrative. As you may recall, I was unable to test Apple’s promised claims of 3.5× improvements for local AI processing thanks to the new Neural Accelerators built into the M5’s GPU. It’s not that I didn’t believe Apple’s numbers. I simply couldn’t test them myself due to the early nature of the software and the timing of my embargo.

Well, I was finally able to test local AI performance with a pre-release version of MLX optimized for M5, and let me tell you: not only is the hype real, but the numbers I got from my extensive tests over the past two weeks actually exceed Apple’s claims.

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Max Weinbach on the M5’s Neural Accelerators→

In addition to the M5 iPad Pro, which I reviewed earlier today, I also received an M5 MacBook Pro review unit from Apple last week. I really wanted to write a companion piece to my iPad Pro story about MLX and the M5’s Neural Accelerators; sadly, I couldn’t get the latest MLX branch to work on the MacBook Pro either.

However, Max Weinbach at Creative Strategies did, and shared some impressive results with the M5 and its GPU’s Neural Accelerators:

These dedicated neural accelerators in each core lead to that 4x speedup of compute! In compute heavy parts of LLMs, like the pre-fill stage (the processing that happens during the time to first token) this should lead to massive speed-ups in performance! The decode, generating each token, should be accelerated by the memory bandwidth improvements of the SoC.

Now, I would have loved to show this off! Unfortunately, full support for the Neural Accelerators isn’t in MLX yet. There is preliminary support, though! There will be an update later this year with full support, but that doesn’t mean we can’t test now! Unfortunately, I don’t have an M4 Mac on me (traveling at the moment) but what I was able to do was compare M5 performance before and after tensor core optimization! We’re seeing between a 3x and 4x speedup in prefill performance!

Looking at Max’s benchmarks with Qwen3 8B and a ~20,000-token prompt, there is indeed a 3.65x speedup in tokens/sec in the prefill stage – jumping from 158.2 tok/s to a remarkable 578.7 tok/s. This is why I’m very excited about the future of MLX for local inference on M5, and why I’m also looking forward to M5 Pro/M5 Max chipsets in future Mac models.

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M5 iPad Pro Review: An AI and Gaming Upgrade for AI and Games That Aren’t There Yet

The M5 iPad Pro.

The M5 iPad Pro.

How do you review an iPad Pro that’s visually identical to its predecessor and marginally improves upon its performance with a spec bump and some new wireless radios?

Let me try:

I’ve been testing the new M5 iPad Pro since last Thursday. If you’re a happy owner of an M4 iPad Pro that you purchased last year, stay like that; there is virtually no reason for you to sell your old model and get an M5-upgraded edition. That’s especially true if you purchased a high-end configuration of the M4 iPad Pro last year with 16 GB of RAM, since upgrading to another high-end M5 iPad Pro model will get you…16 GB of RAM again.

The story is slightly different for users coming from older iPad Pro models and those on lower-end configurations, but barely. Starting this year, the two base-storage models of the iPad Pro are jumping from 8 GB of RAM to 12 GB, which helps make iPadOS 26 multitasking smoother, but it’s not a dramatic improvement, either.

Apple pitches the M5 chip as a “leap” for local AI tasks and gaming, and to an extent, that is true. However, it is mostly true on the Mac, where – for a variety of reasons I’ll cover below – there are more ways to take advantage of what the M5 can offer.

In many ways, the M5 iPad Pro is reminiscent of the M2 iPad Pro, which I reviewed in October 2022: it’s a minor revision to an excellent iPad Pro redesign that launched the previous year, which set a new bar for what we should expect from a modern tablet and hybrid computer – the kind that only Apple makes these days.

For all these reasons, the M5 iPad Pro is not a very exciting iPad Pro to review, and I would only recommend this upgrade to heavy iPad Pro users who don’t already have the (still remarkable) M4 iPad Pro. But there are a couple of narratives worth exploring about the M5 chip on the iPad Pro, which is what I’m going to focus on for this review.

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