The rumours leading up to Apple’s first event of 2022 mentioned that we may see a new chip. Everyone assumed that would mean an M2 chip. But wait, says Apple. We’re not done with the first one yet. Its new M1 Ultra is an absolutely beastly piece of silicon.
At its event in October last year, Apple announced its M1 Pro and Max chips. The chips offered increased performance for Apple’s newly announced MacBooks. Well, the folks in Cupertino wanted more. So they tried strapping two M1 Max chips together. Nothing blew up, so now we have the M1 Ultra.
It is quite literally two M1 Max chips bridged with Apple’s secret die-to-die interconnect sauce they call UltraFusion. Apple says this allows them to achieve bandwidth of up to 2.5 terabytes per second between the chips.
Double the chips, double the specs – mostly
With the M1 Ultra, you get a whopping 20 CPU cores in total, 16 performance cores, and 4 efficiency cores. It has GPU cores aplenty (64 of them — really) and a 32-core Neural Engine for AI processing and machine learning. This monster can support up to 128GB of RAM, or ‘unified memory’ as Apple calls it. With all that considered, Apple says it offers an improvement of 8 times over a regular M1. That math doesn’t look right to us, but we’ll reserve judgment for now.
Apple also makes some bold claims with its apparently ‘industry-leading’ performance per watt. According to them, the M1 Ultra will manage to out-perform a rival 16-core desktop CPU while using 100W less power. The same goes for GPU performance but with 200W less power.
Like most Apple claims, these will need to be verified before they’re believed. But we doubt it’ll be too far off the truth. The company isn’t in the habit of making boasts it can’t back.
The M1 Ultra makes its debut in the newly announced Mac Studio that Apple also confirmed at its event shortly after the chip announcement. The Mac Studio looks like two Mac Minis stacked on each other. Expect an update on that shortly.
Apple also teased that its M1 Ultra will round out the upcoming lineup of Macs with Apple Silicon. There’s some Pro hardware coming, but that was for another day. Expect more mad processor news later in the year.