Apple unveils M1 Ultra, the most powerful Apple Silicon yet

Apple today unveiled its newest silicon to join the M1 lineup, the M1 Ultra. The company says it’s the most powerful chip in the Apple Silicon family.

The M1 Ultra features UltraFusion, Apple’s custom-built packaging architecture, that interconnects the die of two M1 Max chips to create a single system on a chip (SoC). Therefore, the M1 Ultra is twice the performance of the already-powerful M1 Max. Typically, connecting two chips to scale performance increases latency, power consumption, and reduces bandwidth. But Apple claims its UltraFusion technology decreases latency with the use of a silicon interposer that offers a massive 2.5TB/s inter-processor bandwidth. Apple touts “it’s more than 4x the bandwidth of the leading multi-chip interconnect technology.”

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.

With its powerful CPU, massive GPU, incredible Neural Engine, ProRes hardware acceleration, and huge amount of unified memory, M1 Ultra completes the M1 family as the world’s most powerful and capable chip for a personal computer.

JOHNY SROUJI, APPLE’S SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF HARDWARE TECHNOLOGIES

The M1 Ultra is packed with 114 billion transistors and can be configured with up to 128GB unified memory accommodated by a 20-core CPU (16 high-performance and four high-efficiency cores), 64-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine. Apple is making some big claims for the M1 Ultra, citing better performance than a “16-core PC desktop” while using less power. In fact, the Ultra offers eight times the performance of the original M1, according to Apple.

Apple believes the chip will revolutionize activities like 3D rendering, complex image processing, machine learning workflows, and other high-volume tasks. The chip will be available in the all-new Mac Studio, Apple’s high-performance desktop announced at the same event.

Apple Silicon on Mac began with the launch of M1 back in November 2020. Since then, the chip has taken a giant leap in the industry with its high-performance offering while consuming less power. M1 Pro and M1 Max joined the lineup in October last year. During the event, Apple also confirmed that the M1 Ultra is the last chip in the M1 lineup.