It was something of a surprise, but Apple just unveiled the last processor of the M3 family even though the company began the transition to the M4 family a few months ago. With pretty much all M4 Macs now out there, the company revealed that the new Mac Studio features the M4 Max but it can also be upgraded to the M3 Ultra chip.
That said, this announcement confirms a report by Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman that Apple is possibly saving the M4 Ultra processor for its upcoming Mac Pro. Still, even without the last new M4 chip available, the M3 Ultra numbers are impressive.
Apple says this chip has been built using the company’s “innovative UltraFusion packaging architecture, which links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections that offer low latency and high bandwidth.”
“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.”
Apple says the M3 Ultra provides the most performance of any Mac chip while still delivering exceptional power efficiency thanks to its silicon. It features up to a 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores and eight efficiency cores, up to 1.5x the performance of the M2 Ultra and 1.8x of the M1 Ultra. It also has the largest GPU in any Apple chip, with up to 80 graphics cores, making it up to 2x faster performance than the M2 Ultra and 2.6x than the M1 Ultra.
The powerful 32-core Neural Engine handles AI and machine learning tasks. It has over 800GB/s of memory bandwidth. AI professionals can use this new M3 Ultra chip on the Mac Studio to run large language models with over 600 billion parameters directly on the device.
The new Mac Studio starts with 96GB of RAM, but thanks to the M3 Ultra chip, this is the first Apple Silicon Mac to feature up to 512GB of RAM. Apple says this spec removes limitations for ” pro workloads that demand large amounts of graphics memory like 3D rendering, visual effects, and AI.”
Finally, M3 Ultra also brings Thunderbolt 5 to Mac Studio for up to 120GB/s data transfer speeds. Apple also highlights other perks of the M3 Ultra, including the chip’s ability to play back up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video and connect to up to eight Pro Displays XDR.
