Last night, Apple took the stage at its ‘Peek Performance’ launch event to announce a number of new products. Along with the iPhone SE 2022, iPad Air, and the Mac Studio computer, the Cupertino giant also announced one of the world’s most powerful mobile processors, the M1 Ultra.
Just like other M series chips, the M1 Ultra is also an ARM-based custom processor designed specifically for Apple machines. But unlike other M chips, the M1 Ultra will grace the company’s recently unveiled Mac Studio computer.
M1 Ultra is a combination of two M1 Max chips connected through UltraFusion, which is Apple’s new interconnect architecture. UltraFusion uses a silicon interposer with 2.5TB/s bandwidth, which reduces the latency and bandwidth between two separate chips connected through the motherboard.
As a result, the M1 Ultra doubles the resources of the M1 Max with a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine. These numbers are twice as much as the M1 Max.
As always, Apple has also shared performance comparisons with its biggest rivals. According to the company’s benchmarks, the M1 Ultra shows 90% better performance than the Intel Core i9-12900K at the same power consumption. It can even reach Intel’s peak performance while using 100W less.
The M1 Ultra is faster than the Core i9-12900K in multi-threaded tasks as well, but Apple did not say exactly which tasks.
The benchmarks also compared Apple’s 20 core GPU with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090. The M1 Ultra is able to beat Nvidia’s flagship GPU at its peak performance while using 200W less. But once again, Apple did not specify which tasks the two GPUs were compared on.
The M1 Ultra’s memory bandwidth is much higher than previous Apple chips, reaching a whopping 800GB/s. Just like other M series chips, the entire memory bandwidth pool will be available to the CPU and GPU.
Thanks to all this power, the M1 Ultra can undertake insane tasks such as running 18 different streams of 8K ProRes 422 video at the same time. The processor can even support up to five displays which can be 6K Pro Display XDRs.
As mentioned earlier, the M1 Ultra will power Apple’s Mac Studio computer for professionals.
