Apple’s most powerful Mac chip: Apple M1 Ultra

The Apple M1 Ultra is the firm’s most recent bespoke silicon, and it’s the company’s most powerful M1 chip to date.

The M1 Ultra is an extremely capable SoC (system on chip), which was unveiled during the March 2022 Apple Event. It’s essentially two M1 Max chips joined together, an “undiscovered function” of the Max: advanced die-to-die interconnection technology, allowing two Max chips to collaborate for entirely new levels of performance.

Apple calls it “UltraFusion” and appears to be pushing the limits of Apple silicon with it. It will premiere in the Apple Mac Studio, a Mac desktop that bridges the gap between the Mac Pro and mini.

Here’s what we know so far about Apple’s most powerful chip yet, the M1 Ultra.

Apple M1 Ultra: Upgrades

• Apple claims that the new M1 Ultra offers greater peak performance than the top discrete GPUs (like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090), while consuming up to 200W less power.
• The Ultra can handle up to 14 ProRes streams simultaneously, according to Apple.
• Supports up to 128GB unified memory (RAM)
• 32-core Neural Engine
• 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU, the most ever on an Apple chip
• 114 billion transistors, over 7x more than on M1

Apple M1 Ultra: Specs

The M1 Ultra is based on the same Apple M1 architecture as the other Apple M1 chips, combining the CPU and GPU together in a single chip for increased efficiency and decreased latency.

The M1 Ultra is built by physically connecting two M1 Max chips together, according to Apple, utilizing a previously “hidden feature” on the M1 Max — a silicon interposer with the potential for up to 2.5TB/s interprocessor bandwidth.

The M1 Ultra is built on a 2-chip design with combined memory of up to 128GB.

The M1 Ultra has a 20-core CPU with 16 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, which has 114 billion transistors (double the number on the M1 Max). It can use up to 128GB of shared memory with a speed of up to 800 GB/second.

The original M1 chip had eight cores, while the new one has 64. The GPU in this device is also remarkable; it’s nearly 8x more powerful than the previous one. It also includes a 32-core Neural Engine for even better image processing and machine learning capabilities.

Apple M1 Ultra: Price and release date

The M1 Ultra is anticipated to be unveiled in the new Mac Studio, Apple’s most recent high-end desktop.

The Mac Pro desktop starts at $1,999, but the M1 Ultra chip will set you back at least $3,999. You may pre-order them now on Apple’s website and receive them on March 18th.