Measuring the M5 Max’s CPU power consumption with the powermetrics command-line tool, average power consumption during our Handbrake video encoding test is about 23 percent higher than M4 Max, and because of that increase, the chip uses just a bit more energy overall to do the same work.
This is a bit concerning to me. These are still ultimately laptops and battery life still matters. If this metric is to be taken at face value, it seems that the new M5 Pro/Max mostly gives modest improvements in multi-core performance, but also costs the same amount in power efficiency? I'm not sure I understand why it justifies a new design then. If it uses more power I would have expected a better increase in performance given it's a new design.
Comparing the official specs for the
M5 Pro / Max and the
M4 Pro / Max though it does suggest the battery life should be similar between the two, so I wonder what gives. It could be that for normal usages the battery consumption is the same, or that Apple is using the high/low end of the testing report range to hide some decrease in battery life between the two. The M5 Max does have a mysterious 2 extra hours for "video streaming" but I'm guessing that's something to do with the video decoding rather than raw CPU compute.
Edit: Nevermind, I just re-read what was written. Given that it took less time to run, and the metrics tool was measuring power usage not energy usage, it made sense that the M5 Max used more power. So seems like as a package both use similar power consumption. I'm still curious about how the idling performance work for the new "performance" cores though.
