GoKawiilLet's start with the Apple's most powerful processor ever, the M5 Ultra, coming to new high-end Mac Studio machines. Though based on the M5's older third-generation 3nm process, it fuses two dual-die M5 Max chips to form the quad-die architecture, "a first for Apple silicon," according to the company.
Joining four chips might sound clunky, but the M5 Ultra's interconnects run at a record 4.4TB/s, allowing the quad dies to operate very much as a single processor. It's available with up to 36 cores (12 super cores and 24 performance cores) that deliver up to 25 percent higher single-threaded performance and 30 percent better multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra.
The M5 Ultra supports up to 512GB of high-bandwidth unified memory with 1.2TB/s of bandwidth, up 50 percent over the M3 Ultra. Given current sky-high memory prices, that could push your Mac Studio with M5 Ultra into five-figure territory, since the base model starts at $5,499. That may be worth it for some AI power users, though. The extra memory will let them "store huge datasets entirely in local memory, increase the tokens-per-second speed, and run huge LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on device," Apple explains.
Apple
Boosting those speeds further is a next-gen 80-core (max) GPU with a neural accelerator in each core that bumps peak AI compute 4.5 times compared to the M3 Ultra, while boosting graphics performance by 40 percent. It should handle whatever video creators throw at it as well, thanks to an updated Media Engine with four ProRes encode and decode engines, along with hardware-accelerated AV1, H.264 and HEVC codecs. Along with the extra compute power, Apple promises "industry leading energy efficiency."