Today, Apple announced the new M1 Ultra chip, described by Apple as the most powerful chip in the range.
This is what Apple say;
“Built from two M1 Max chips, M1 Ultra lets you power through workflows on an unprecedented scale. So you can run complex particle simulations or work with massive 3D environments that were previously impossible to render. And with twice the media engine resources, M1 Ultra can support up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video playback — something no other personal computer can do.”
The new Apple M1 Ultra chip is effectively 2 M1 Max chips joined together using a die called UltraFusion, it offers 2.5tbs bandwidth. Although it is effectively two chips it behaves like one chip.
Apple claim these performance gains compared to M1 Max.
Up to 3.8x faster CPU performance
Up to 4.5x faster GPU performance
Up to 3.0x faster machine learning
It supports 128gbs of unified memory, 20 core CPU and 64-core GPU. It’s nearly 8 times faster than the M1 Max. It has twice the capability of the original M1 Max media engine. Apple claims it has 90% higher performance than a conventional Intel desktop chip, while using one third of the power.
M1 Ultra is tightly integrated with the macOS meaning the OS can scale with the chip.
The new chips power their new M1 Mac Studio computer, made for those working in studios.
Apple silicon has transformed the Mac lineup, bringing unbelievable performance and power efficiency with its breakthrough system on a chip (SoC) architecture. Combining the CPU, GPU, I/O, Neural Engine and more into a single SoC with unified memory, this architecture means all Mac computers are much faster, cooler and more power efficient. To complete the M1 family, we took another giant leap with Apple silicon to bring even more extreme levels of performance for the desktop. The challenge is that there are physical limits to creating a larger die than M1 Max. Enter UltraFusion.
The incredible M1 Ultra chip actually starts with M1 Max. From its inception, M1 Max has held the ability to connect to another M1 Max die using a custom-built packaging architecture called UltraFusion. With twice the connection density of any technology available, UltraFusion provides a massive 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth between the two dies using very little power.
The final member of the M1 family, M1 Ultra joins two M1 Max dies — yet it looks like a single piece of silicon to software, so apps benefit from its extraordinary capabilities without requiring any additional work from developers. The result is the most powerful chip ever in a personal computer.
At the core of it all. M1 Max and M1 Ultra CPUs leverage high-performance cores and high-efficiency cores — up to 20 CPU cores in total — to deliver industry-leading performance per watt. Up to 64 GPU cores deliver massive amounts of graphics performance. And up to 32 Neural Engine cores execute up to 22 trillion operations per second for accelerated machine learning tasks.