John Siracusa

Whatever the most powerful cores are inside a line of chips, Apple now calls them super cores in the M5 line, and it's true across the entire line.

Then Apple says that they have a new kind of core, which is the performance core.

So in some M5 chips,

There's the super core, and then there's a new kind of core called the performance core, which is not the same as the efficiency cores in the plain Jane M5.

So every chip has two kinds of cores, big ones and little ones.

It's actually called big, little, and arm parlance, right?

The big ones are called super cores in the M5, but the little ones have two different names.

Now, does that mean that the little cores in the M5 are different than the little cores in the M5 Pro and M5 Max?

Probably, yeah.

Probably they're actually different cores, so...

Having two different names to them makes sense.

The names themselves don't make any sense.

But having these three names, super, efficiency, and performance, those three names refer to three actual different hardware things.

And I think the reason they're different is, as we noted when we talked about the M5 chip, the M5 is not made using what Apple is calling their fusion architecture.

We were talking about it in TSMC terms as a...

S-O-I-C-M-H, silicon on... I forget what it stands for.

It was like hyphen molding horizontal.

Anyway, TSMC has a tech where you can take multiple dies and put it onto a thing and make a chip out of it.

And we were talking about how that's better because you can make a bunch of littler dies and stick them together instead of trying to make one big one.

The M5 doesn't do that.