Apple held its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address earlier today, and during the event, the Cupertino firm announced its new M2 Ultra system on a chip (SoC). The M2 Ultra delivers huge performance increases to the Mac.
M2 Ultra uses a second-generation 5-nanometer fabrication process and uses Apple’s UltraFusion technology to connect two M2 Max chips, providing double the performance. M2 Ultra boasts 134 billion transistors — 20 billion more than M1 Ultra. The M2 Max’s unified memory architecture supports up to 192GB of memory capacity, which is 50% more than M1 Ultra, and features 800GB/s of memory bandwidth — twice that of M2 Max.
M2 Ultra’s CPU is 20% faster than M1 Ultra, and has a larger GPU that’s up to 30% faster, and a Neural Engine that’s up to 40% faster. It also boasts a media engine with twice the capabilities of M2 Max.
“M2 Ultra delivers astonishing performance and capabilities for our pro users’ most demanding workflows, while maintaining Apple silicon’s industry-leading power efficiency,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “With huge performance gains in the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, combined with massive memory bandwidth in a single SoC, M2 Ultra is the world’s most powerful chip ever created for a personal computer.”
M2 Ultra is built by connecting two M2 Max dies through UltraFusion, Apple’s custom-built packaging technology. UltraFusion uses a silicon interposer that connects the dies with more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth.
Apple’s UltraFusion architecture allows the M2 Ultra to appear as a single chip to software, allowing code to take full advantage of M2 Ultra without the code being rewritten.
M2 Ultra features 800GB/s of system memory bandwidth and it can be configured with up to 192GB of unified memory.
M2 Ultra integrates Apple’s latest custom technologies right on the chip, maximizing performance and efficiency:
- M2 Ultra features a 32-core Neural Engine, delivering 31.6 trillion operations per second, which is 40 percent faster performance than M1 Ultra.
- The powerful media engine has twice the capabilities of M2 Max, further accelerating video processing. It has dedicated, hardware-enabled H.264, HEVC, and ProRes encode and decode, allowing M2 Ultra to play back up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video — far more than any PC chip can do.
- The display engine supports up to six Pro Display XDRs, driving more than 100 million pixels.
- The latest Secure Enclave, along with hardware-verified secure boot and runtime anti-exploitation technologies, provides best-in-class security.
The M2 Ultra power the new Mac Pro, making the Mac transition to Apple silicon complete.
For more information about the M2 Ultra, visit the Apple website.
