Apple today announced the M5 Ultra, which the company says is its most powerful chip ever.
The M5 Ultra is built by connecting two dual-chip M5 Max chips using Apple’s next-generation UltraFusion technology, which is the first time Apple has used a quad-chip architecture in an M-series chip. UltraFusion increases inter-chip bandwidth to over 4.4 TB/s and connection density to over 6x, allowing all four chips to function as a single processor.
The chip features a processor with up to 36 cores, containing 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, delivering up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multi-threaded performance than the M3 Ultra.
Its GPU scales up to 80 cores, with a neural accelerator integrated into each core for the first time on an Ultra chip. Apple claims this delivers up to 4.3x better AI computing performance than the M3 Ultra, as well as up to 1.8x faster graphics than the previous generation chip.
The M5 Ultra also includes a 32-core Neural Engine and a more capable Media Engine, with twice as many video encoding and decoding blocks as the M5 Max, allowing users to simultaneously play back up to 33 streams of 8K ProRes 422 at 30fps.
The chip 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 M5 Ultra is exclusively available in the new Mac Studio, available for pre-order today, with availability starting September 22. Configurations with 512 GB of memory will be launched at the end of October.
