Apple's latest M1 Ultra processor comes packing the most power of all Apple silicone chips, but it's not one everyone should buy.
At Apple’s “Peek Performance” event, the company unveiled a brand new Apple silicon chip, the M1 Ultra. The M1 Ultra is the last chip in the M1 family, and the most powerful by far.
But Apple didn’t design this chip for everyone to use. Here, we’ll look at how powerful M1 Ultra actually is, and who the chip is most suited for.
M1 Ultra is Apple’s latest (and last) Apple silicon system-on-a-chip (SoC) in the M1 family, unveiled at the Peek Performance event, among other new products. As it’s an SoC, all parts of the computer are on the same chip, rather than a separate CPU, GPU, and so on. The processor is actually made from two M1 Max chips from last year’s release.
These two chips are connected using UltraFusion, Apple’s technology to combine processors. UltraFusion uses a silicon interposer to connect the chips, rather than the typical connection through a motherboard. M1 Ultra’s chips have been connected across more than 10,000 signals, which provides 2.5TB/s of low latency, inter-processor bandwidth.
M1 Ultra features an extraordinarily powerful 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. With the chip, memory bandwidth is 800GB/s, and M1 Ultra can be configured with 128GB of unified memory.
The 32-core Neural Engine inside M1 Ultra runs up to 22 trillion operations per second, which is dedicated to machine learning tasks. Historically, Apple uses this for on-board video and audio processing, as well as other day-to-day processes.
With double the media engine capabilities of the M1 Max, the M1 Ultra also offers incredible ProRes video encoding and decoding. M1 Ultra supports playback of up to 18 streams of 8K video, which is a crazy stat to write down.
Right off the bat, M1 Ultra is powerful. Really powerful. The numbers Apple showed during the “Peek Performance” event are truly astonishing. Simply put, the M1 Ultra is made from two M1 Max processors, so it should have twice the performance, right?
M1 Ultra actually beats out the most popularly spec’d Mac Pro. Just for clarification, this is Apple’s most expensive computer, with some configurations costing up to $50,000.
According to Apple’s graphs from the keynote, M1 Ultra is 50 percent faster than the Mac Pro when completing tasks. It uses 90 percent less power than a 16-core desktop PC (with an Intel Core i9), and is still faster.
The graphics are 3.4x faster than the Mac Pro, and use 200W less power than the highest end GPU (GeForce RTX 3090) while still being faster.
Of course, we know Apple likes to use fairly vague graphs and comparisons to older devices, to favorably show the performance of the new chips. But let’s look at the cold, hard facts.
The baseline M1 Ultra has twice as much…well…twice as much of everything when compared to the baseline M1 Max. The M1 Ultra has a 20-core CPU rather than a 10, a 48-core GPU rather than a 24, a 32-core Neural Engine rather than a 16, and 64GB unified memory rather than 32GB. We could go on and on, but you get the picture.
There's actually a leaked benchmark from Geekbench for the new M1 Ultra, which is the first real-world performance test. The benchmark shows a CPU single-core score of 1,793, and multi-core score of 24,055. This thrashes the Mac Pro with 40% better single-core performance and almost 15% better multi-core performance.
As the M1 Ultra is first coming inside the new Mac Studio, we’ll have to wait until March 18 to see more benchmarks on the M1 Ultra. Suffice to say, we’re probably not going to be disappointed.
We’ve looked at just how insanely powerful the M1 Ultra is, and all the numbers might have been a bit scary to digest. The M1 Ultra is powerful, there’s no question about it. But who’s it for?
The M1 Ultra is designed for professional use, rather than everyday use by the average consumer. Of course, anyone could configure a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra, but they shouldn’t (you
probably didn’t expect us to say that).
With so much power inside the M1 Ultra, the average consumer is unlikely to use it all. You’re almost certainly not going to need the M1 Ultra’s power unless you’re running a professional studio. Even some professionals might not use the full performance M1 Ultra offers!
M1 Ultra has been created for the uppermost tier of professionals. Those who complete the craziest of tasks that need all the computing power they can get their hands on. It’s an important market to capture (or more appropriately, dominate), so it’s a welcome introduction from Apple.
The new M1 Ultra processor is Apple’s most powerful yet, and it really does boast some incredible numbers. We’re only two years in to Apple silicon, and we’re already at this stage. It only makes you wonder just how much further Apple can go.
Connor Jewiss is the Internet Section Editor at MUO. He has 6 years of experience writing and editing for tech publications, as well as in the tech startup world. Featured in newspapers and magazines in the UK as well, Connor has a passion for technology.
Join our newsletter for tech tips, reviews, free ebooks, and exclusive deals!