Apple today unveiled its new M3 Ultra chip, which is the fastest Mac chip ever released. The new chip powers the new Mac Studio, which was also unveiled today.
The new M3 Ultra chip option boasts up to a 32-core CPU, with 24 performance cores and eight efficiency cores. Apple says the M3 Ultra chip is up to 1.5x faster than the previous Mac Studio’s M2 Ultra chip, which has up to a 24-core CPU. Apple says the M3 Ultra chip is essentially two M3 Max chips fused together with its “UltraFusion” technology, so the chip’s specs are all doubled compared to the M3 Max.
Apple’s custom-built UltraFusion packaging technology uses an embedded silicon interposer that connects two M3 Max dies across more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth, and making M3 Ultra appear as a single chip to software.
The M3 Ultra chip can be configured with up to an 80-core GPU. Apple says the M3 Ultra chip offers up to 2x faster graphics performance than the M2 Ultra, and up to 2.6x faster graphics than the M1 Ultra chip.
The chip boasts a 32-core Neural Engine, and offers support for up to 512GB of unified RAM, with up to 819 GB/s memory bandwidth.
The M3 Ultra chip supports Thunderbolt 5 for up to 120 GB/s data transfer speeds on Macs with Thunderbolt 5 ports.
Apple says the M3 Ultra chip has industry-leading power efficiency in its class.
“M3 Ultra is the pinnacle of our scalable system-on-a-chip architecture, aimed specifically at users who run the most heavily threaded and bandwidth-intensive applications,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “Thanks to its 32-core CPU, massive GPU, support for the most unified memory ever in a personal computer, Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, and industry-leading power efficiency, there’s no other chip like M3 Ultra.”
M3 Ultra integrates Apple’s advanced technologies right on the chip:
- Apple’s custom-built UltraFusion packaging technology uses an embedded silicon interposer that connects two M3 Max dies across more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth, and making M3 Ultra appear as a single chip to software.
- With 2x the resources of M3 Max, the media engine within M3 Ultra is capable of far more concurrent video processing. The chip offers dedicated, hardware-enabled H.264, HEVC, and four ProRes encode and decode engines, allowing M3 Ultra to play back up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video.
- The display engine supports up to eight Pro Display XDRs, driving more than 160 million pixels.
- The Secure Enclave works with hardware-verified secure boot and runtime anti-exploitation technologies to provide state-of-the-art security.
