Apple will reportedly assemble the high-end M5 chips using 2.5D packaging. This is a chip design approach that places a processor’s compute modules atop a common base layer, or interposer. The interposer is itself a semiconductor that allows data to move between the chip’s other components.

Apple's powerful SoC — "system on a chip" — processors have been the source of its greatness for years, bringing incredible performance and long-lasting battery life to iPhones, iPads, and Macs because they use far less power processing everything we do on a laptop.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that Apple will move away from its current processor designs that keep the CPU and GPU cores on the same chip — and see a performance gain.