The M5 Ultra Mac Studio: I Did the Math So You Don't Have To
Apple announced the new Mac Studio this morning — M5 Max and the first-ever M5 Ultra. Pre-orders are open, units ship September 22, and the headline for our corner of the world is this: up to 512GB of unified memory at 1.2TB/s, with Neural Accelerators in every GPU core. Base M5 Ultra: $5,499 . The config you actually want: closer to $10,000 . I've spent the morning reading the spec sheet and the…
Apple unveiled two new Mac Studio models with the M5 Ultra chip, promising significant performance improvements for AI and machine learning workloads. Pre-orders opened immediately, with shipping scheduled for September 22. The base M5 Ultra model starts at $5,499, while a more powerful configuration with 36 CPU cores, 80-core GPU, and 96GB unified memory is priced at $6,799, with an additional $4,000 for 512GB of memory.
The most notable upgrades include dedicated matrix-multiply hardware (Neural Accelerators) in each GPU core, a significant 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth increase, and a quad-die chip architecture. This configuration allows for up to 36 CPU cores and an 80-core GPU, delivering unprecedented performance for locally running models.
The pricing strategy has been criticized, as the $5,499 model essentially lacks the full 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU configuration, and the 512GB memory upgrade adds a significant cost. The Mac Studio's memory capacity and moderate bandwidth are particularly advantageous for training large, memory-bound models, especially those based on the emerging MoE (Mixture-of-Experts) architecture.
However, for deploying models at scale with concurrent users, the NVIDIA hardware remains the superior choice due to its CUDA support and more efficient batching techniques.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
