Apple just launched the new M5 Ultra for the latest Mac Studio, and as you’d expect, it’s the fastest consumer processor the company has ever built. But how much faster is it than its predecessor, the M3 Ultra? Let’s dive in and see how Apple’s latest super silicon stacks up.
If you’ve followed Apple’s Ultra family of chips so far, you’ve probably noticed that it has skipped the M2, M4, and M6 generations and is only available in M1 Ultra, M3 Ultra, and now M5 Ultra versions. The reason for this (and the lag behind Apple’s other chips) is complexity: it’s actually two processors coupled together using Apple’s “Ultrafusion” bridge technology.
This chip fusion design has been carried over to the M5 Ultra, but there is one key change from before. The M3 Ultra married two M3 Max arrays with more than 10,000 high-speed connections, according to Apple. However, the M5 Ultra merges two double matrix The M5 Max chips will form an entirely new quad-chip architecture, a first for Apple silicon. The new chip also has six times higher connection density and increases interconnect speed to 4.4 TB/s, compared to 2.5 TB/s for the M3 Ultra. These faster speeds between chips allow for improved efficiency and faster performance.
The M5 Ultra offers up to 36 processing cores in the high-end version, up from 32. These include 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, compared to the M3 Ultra’s 24 performance cores and eight “efficiency” cores. These additional, faster cores allow it to deliver 25% faster single-threaded performance and up to 30% faster multi-threaded performance.
Both chips support up to 512 GB of unified memory. However, the M5 Ultra increases unified memory performance by 50% over the M3 Ultra to 1.2 TB/s, allowing you to “store huge data sets entirely in local memory, increase token per second speeds, and run massive LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on the device,” Apple says. However, given today’s high memory prices, the top 512GB configuration will likely exceed five figures.
The M5 Ultra and M3 Ultra both have 80 GPU cores, but Apple has redesigned them to improve graphics and AI performance. There is now a neural accelerator in each core that increases AI calculation speeds by up to 4.5x compared to the M3 Ultra. The GPU also features Apple’s latest shader core with second-generation dynamic caching, as well as hardware-accelerated mesh shading and third-generation ray tracing, delivering up to a 40% speed increase over the M3 Ultra.
And for content creators, the M5 Ultra comes with an updated media engine with four ProRes encoding and decoding engines, as well as hardware-accelerated AV1, H.264, and HEVC codecs. The Media Engine’s improved speeds will let you play 33 streams of ProRes 8K 30fps video at once, up from 24. Connecting fast storage will be easy, as the M5 Ultra pro supports 120Gbps Thunderbolt 5 connection speeds, just like the M3 Pro.
In addition to the extra computing power, Apple also promises “leading power efficiency,” although it hasn’t provided any numbers to back up that claim. However, Apple gave some examples of performance improvements over the M3 Ultra:
- Up to 3.3x faster CopyCat ML training performance in Foundry Nuke compared to Mac Studio with M3 Ultra.
- LLM prompt processing up to 4x faster in LM Studio compared to Mac Studio with M3 Ultra.
- Up to 4.3x faster text-to-image LLM performance compared to Mac Studio with M3 Ultra.
- Up to 1.7x faster scene rendering performance in Maxon Redshift compared to Mac Studio with M3 Ultra.
As mentioned, Ultra processors are a generation and M number behind Apple’s other chips, so they use older process technology. The M5 Ultra uses TSMC’s third-generation 3-nanometer process, while the new M6 is built using 2nm technology. However, the M5 Ultra’s third-generation 3nm process is considerably more efficient and capable than the M3 Ultra, as the latter is built using TSMC’s older first-generation 3nm process.
Apple product prices have increased across the board (thanks to AI data centers) and the new Mac Studio is no exception. If you’re lucky enough to already own an M3 Ultra-powered version, you probably won’t need to upgrade to the M5 Ultra unless you’re a serious power user with some money. If you’re in the market for a new machine, prepare to cry: The M5 Ultra-powered Mac Studios with 96GB of RAM will start at $5,499, compared to $3,999 for the base 96GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio when it launched last year, an increase of $1,500.
