Apple recently conducted its first launch event for 2022. Following the previous trend for this early launch event, we have two new colors for the iPhone 13 series, a new iPhone SE, new iPad Air with the M1 chip, and finally the biggest launch of the event, the new M1 Ultra.
The only device on which you can get the new M1 Ultra chipset is the new Mac Studio. However, in this article, we will be focusing on the new M1 Ultra chip.
Apple shocked the industry when the first introduced the M1 chip. Because it’s built by Apple, the M1 chip is so powerful and efficient that it just eats its counterparts easily. Then last year, Apple launched the successors of the M1 chip: the M1 Pro and M1 Max for the new MacBook Pro series. However, the Cupertino tech giant didn’t want to stop there. So they have now launched the M1 Ultra chip and this is easily one of the most powerful chips on any PC right now.
About the M1 Ultra Chip
You can think of the new M1 Ultra as a fusion of two M1 Max chips. As per Apple, they are able to achieve this goal by their UltraFusion packaging architecture.
So what’s so special about the new M1 Ultra chip? Well, this chip is available only for Mac Studio and it can unlock the next level of performance while also maintaining industry-leading performance per watt.
Apple likes to talk in numbers and graphs so let’s have a look at some of the unprecedented performance and specifications that this new M1 Ultra chip brings:
- The new M1 Ultra SoC contains 114 billion transistors which are the most ever in a PC.
- It can have up to 128GB of high-bandwidth, low latency unified memory.
- It comes with a 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores. This chip can deliver 90% more multi-threaded performance compared to the fastest available 16-core PC desktop chip in the same power bracket.
- It has an insane 64-core GPU which can deliver more performance than the highest-end PC GPU and consume 200Watts less power at the same time.
- Then you also get 32 Neural Engine Cores that can run up to 22 trillion operations per second.
On top of that, if we talk about the new Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, it has double the media engine and can play back 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 Video which is just insane. As per Apple, this chip can transcode video to ProRes at about a rate of 5.6x faster than the 28-core Mac Pro with an Afterburner card.
How Did They Make It?
As mentioned earlier, the M1 Ultra chip is made by connecting the die of two M1 Max using Apple’s UltraFusion technology. Because of the UltraFusion technology, Apple managed to avoid issues like increased latency, reduced bandwidth, more power consumption, etc.
In fact, the new M1 Ultra has an insane 2.5TB/s inter-processor bandwidth and 800GB/s of memory bandwidth for the combined thing.
Closing Phrase
The new M1 Ultra Chip is truly remarkable and it is easily one of the most powerful SoCs available right now. The current lineup of the M1 family stands as follows: M1 chip, M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra.
With Mac Studio and macOS Monterey, the M1 Ultra is definitely going to unlock next-level performance for creators who always want a little more.