Apple's M5 Ultra is its most powerful chip ever - with 4x faster AI performance than M3 Ultra

Mac Studio Display XDR Kerry Wan/ZDNET

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ZDNET's key takeaways

Apple announced its new Mac Mini and Mac Studio with the M6, M5 Max, and M5 Ultra chips.

The M5 Ultra is its most powerful chip ever.

Prices have also gone up, with the Mac Mini M6 starting at $899.

Apple announced on Tuesday a new range of chip configurations for its Mac Mini and Mac Studio desktop devices with the base M6 processor, M5 Max, and M5 Ultra chips. The latter is the company's most powerful chip to date, representing a new high-end processor tier with an 80-core GPU and four times faster LLM prompt performance compared to the M3 Ultra.

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The M5 Ultra features up to a 36-core CPU and up to 512GB of unified memory, enabling users to run massive LLMs locally on-device. Particularly interesting, however, is the M5 Ultra chip's jump up in connectivity, with support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, up to six Thunderbolt 5 ports with transfer speeds up to 120Gb/s of bandwidth, which can drive up to eight external displays, or four Studio Display XDR displays at 5K resolution and 120Hz refresh.

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