The final member of the M1 family of Apple processors, the M1 Ultra, has been announced by the Cupertino company, bringing “breathtaking computing power” to the new Mac Studio.
This chip – the highest-end one offered by Apple – effectively combines two M1 Max processors. The M1 Max was only unveiled – alongside the M1 Pro – as recently as October, and the new M1 Ultra boasts 128GB of unified memory.
The system on a chip (SoC) comprises 114 billion transistors, and features memory bandwidth amounting to 800GB/s, as well as 2.5TB/s inter-processor bandwidth. It is capable of 22 trillion operations a second, and offers a GPU performance eight times quicker than that of the M1 chip introduced in 2020.
With its combination of a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine, the M1 Ultra has been described by Apple as “providing astonishing performance for developers compiling code, artists working in huge 3D environments that were previously impossible to render, and video professionals who can transcode video to ProRes up to 5.6x faster than with a 28-core Mac Pro with Afterburner.”
Senior vice president of Hardware Technologies at Apple, Johny Srouji, commented: “M1 Ultra is another game-changer for Apple silicon that once again will shock the PC industry. By connecting two M1 Max die with our UltraFusion packaging architecture, we’re able to scale Apple silicon to unprecedented new heights.”
He hailed the processor as “the world’s most powerful and capable chip for a personal computer.”