Apple unveils M6 and M5 Ultra chips with more horsepower and AI compute
Apple is giving its Mac lineup a split personality: one chip built to make everyday computing and on-device AI faster, and another designed for workloads most people will never come close to exhausting. The company has announced the M6 and M5 Ultra, alongside new versions of the Mac mini and Mac Studio. M6 becomes Apple’s […]
Apple has unveiled two new Ultra chips for its Mac lineup, the M6 and M5 Ultra. M6 is Apple's first 2nm chip and powers the new Mac mini. It features a 12-core GPU, up to 32GB of unified memory, and a 16-core Neural Engine. The M6 chip delivers up to 1.2 times faster multithreaded performance and 30% higher peak GPU compute for AI workloads compared to its predecessor, the M5.
M5 Ultra, on the other hand, is designed for high-performance workloads and takes a more extreme approach. It combines two dual-die M5 Max chips through its UltraFusion interconnect, creating a quad-die architecture with up to 36 cores, 80 cores for the GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine. M5 Ultra boasts a 512GB memory capacity and up to 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth.
Apple claims that this will enable running large AI models with hundreds of billions of parameters locally. The new chips will be available for preorder from September 22, with the Mac mini and Mac Studio arriving on the same date. The M6 chip represents a significant step forward from the M5, while M5 Ultra pushes the Mac Studio into workstation territory.
The pricing and practicality of these gains outside demanding creative and AI workloads remain to be seen.
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