Apple today announced new Mac Studio models powered by the M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, the latter being the most powerful chip the company has ever made.
The M5 Ultra chip features up to a 36-core processor containing 12 super cores and 24 performance cores. It delivers up to 1.25x better single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x better multi-threaded performance than the previous generation Mac Studio M3 Ultra.
The M5 Ultra has a GPU with up to 80 cores and a neural accelerator is integrated into each core, providing up to 4.5 times the maximum GPU computing for AI tasks compared to the M3 Ultra and more than 6 times compared to the M1 Ultra. Apple says the GPU’s latest core shader technology, combined with second-generation dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and third-generation ray tracing, delivers up to 40 percent faster graphics performance than the M3 Ultra.
The chip also includes a higher-performance media engine, with dedicated hardware for H.264, HEVC, four ProRes encoding and decoding engines, and hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding, as well as a 32-core neural engine for on-device AI tasks.
The M5 Ultra is built by connecting two dual-chip M5 Max chips using Apple’s next-generation UltraFusion technology, which increases inter-chip bandwidth to over 4.4 TB/s and connection density by over 6x, allowing all four chips to function as a single processor.
The new Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra supports up to 512 GB of unified memory and up to 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth, a 50% increase over the M3 Ultra. Apple says the additional memory and bandwidth allows users to store large data sets locally, increase the number of tokens per second, and run large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on the device.
The Mac Studio is also now available with the M5 Max chip, offering an 18-core CPU, up to 40 GPU cores, up to 256GB of memory, and up to 8TB of storage.
The new Mac Studio will be released on September 22, but the model with 512 GB of unified memory will launch in late October. It is available for pre-order now.
