M1 Ultra unveiled
More cores, more power than the M1 Max
The most significant feature of the Mac Studio is the new M1 Ultra, the latest piece of Apple silicon to emerge from Cupertino and the most powerful System on a Chip (SoC) the company has announced to date.
The M1 Ultra effectively combines two M1 Max chips into a single die with a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU and 32-core Neural Engine, plus support for up to 128GB of unified memory, enabling the Mac Studio to not only outperform Apple’s most expensive Mac, the Mac Pro, but many high-end PCs too.
Apple says it’s been able to do this thanks to UltraFusion, technology that uses a silicon interposer to seamlessly connect the two M1 Max chips in the M1 Ultra using 10,000 signals, delivering 2TB/s of low-latency, inter-processor bandwidth – or four times that of other multi-chip interconnect technologies.
With 114 billion transistors onboard, Apple says the M1 Ultra can deliver 90% of the multi-threaded performance of the fastest 16-core desktop PC chip while drawing 100W less power. It also claims that the M1 Ultra’s 64-core GPU can outperform even discrete PC graphics cards while also using up to 200W less power. Those are quite some numbers.
More mind-boggling stats come in the form of the M1 Ultra’s memory with an 800GB/s bandwidth – or 10x that of the latest desktop PC chips. In addition, the M1 Ultra’s 32-core Neural Engine is also capable of perfoming 22 trillion operations per second when performing machine learning tasks, while a Mac Studio equipped with an M1 Ultra is capable of delivering up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video at the same time – a feat Apple says no other chip available today can do.
Ultra overkill?
As impressive as the M1 Ultra is, having that much power on tap is likely to be overkill for the overwhelming majority of us, especially when you take the already impressive performance of the existing M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max chips into account.
Those deeply impressive stats only help reinforce the impression that Apple absolutely made the right call in choosing to move to its own Apple silicon rather than sticking with Intel. And it looks like there will be lots more to come. The next wave of Macs are expected to feature even more impressive
Apple silicon with M2 chips already rumoured to be on the horizon.
The future of the Mac is looking very bright indeed.