Leaked Apple Chip Details Point to a Three-Tier Core Design

Apple's next round of silicon is taking shape from scraps of evidence, and the latest follow-up segment on the Accidental Tech Podcast gathered much of it in one place. Most of the clues came from developer tools, beta software, and early reviews of the new MacBook Neo.

The most concrete lead is a chip identifier. A developer spotted a reference to CPUFAMILY_ARM_SOTRA, which maps to the internal name H17S, in Xcode. The same identifier was reportedly the one missing from the M5 Pro entry in an iOS 26.3 release candidate, which makes it a strong candidate for an unannounced Apple chip.

The reported design uses three core types. The "Super" cores run at up to 4.61 GHz and decode ten instructions wide. The "Performance" cores top out at 4.38 GHz, decode seven wide, and are said to deliver about 70 percent of a Super core's performance. The efficiency cores run at 3.05 GHz with six-wide decoding. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham is among the sources that have described the cache layout, which gives the Super cores 16 MB of L2 cache, the Performance cores 8 MB, and the efficiency cores 6 MB. The show's notes also list minimum clock speeds, from 972 MHz for the efficiency cores up to 1,344 MHz for the Performance cores. The labels used in the notes are inconsistent, so the naming should be treated as provisional.

Separate leaker reports suggest the M5 Pro and M5 Max are built on TSMC's N3P process, while the base M5 uses N3E. That would make the higher-end chips a refinement of the process used for the standard model, not a copy of it.

The episode also covered the Studio Display XDR, which Apple has described in a white paper. Its highlights include a superwide viewing angle, a timing controller, factory calibration, and several display optimization modes. Hosts debated whether it or the Pro Display XDR makes more sense for a given buyer, a question that reflects how confusing Apple's display lineup has become.

On the MacBook Neo, reviewers and listeners have been testing whether the lower-priced laptop can run professional software, whether it supports Rosetta 2, and how its SSD speeds compare with rival machines. Those answers will matter more than any single benchmark when Apple's broader chip lineup arrives.