Apple has announced the company’s most powerful chip for a personal computer ever — the M1 Ultra. The M1 Ultra is the company’s most powerful ARM-based custom processor designed for its Mac Studio desktop computer.
Featuring UltraFusion, the M1 Ultra is basically two M1 Max chips connected together with a new interconnection architecture. It uses a silicon interposer that connects the chips across more than 10,000 signals, providing a massive 2.5TB/s of low latency, inter-processor bandwidth — more than 4x the bandwidth of the leading multi-chip interconnect technology. This enables M1 Ultra to behave and be recognized by software as one chip, so developers don’t need to rewrite code to take advantage of its performance.
Since it is essentially two M1 Max chips, the M1 Ultra has a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine.
In terms of CPU performance, Apple claims that the M1 Ultra offers 90% higher performance for the same power consumption as an Intel Core i9-12900K and can match Intel’s peak performance by using 100W less.
As for GPU performance, the M1 Ultra consumes 200W less power than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 at its peak performance while also outperforming the NVIDIA graphics card. However, Apple didn’t specify under which tasks were achieved for the comparisons.
The memory bandwidth on the M1 Ultra is increased to 800GB/s and it can be configured with up to 128GB of unified memory. It supports up to five displays (four 6K Pro Display XDR + one 4K display) and it is able to play back up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video at the same time.