M5 Ultra Chip Coming to Mac Studio in 2026

......waiting for Russian comrades to make their unboxing video

When are they going to stop goofing around and discontinue the Mac Pro? It is still on M2 and still $7k.

This will be the most powerful AI machine…

…that doesn’t run AI.

lol what

pytorch runs fine

Local models work fairly well despite the drawbacks of M4 (low inference speed mostly).

M5 will hugely improve this: per GPU core neural acceleration, matrix math improvements, etc. Inference should be significantly faster depending on how high they get the memory bandwidth and what they do with the interposer and SoIC / chip stacking, if it happens this generation.

There are metal optimized libraries that work pretty well and there is an apple-funded CUDA -> MLX workflow in progress.

This machine is going to be excellent for personal and professional AI development / fine-tuning, and for ~$12k it’s going to cost what one nvidia card with 1/5 of the GPU memory does.

If you need really big data nvidia stuff you can just connect to the cloud, but for local work nothing will compare to this for a long time that isn’t 10x the cost.

I say all this also owning a 5090 that’s going into a Linux workstation next week for local CUDA work by the way. :)


Now, fi you were talking about Apple Intelligence… fair point! I have low faith especially given the new rumors that they are not teaming with Anthropic which is an enormous mistake, if true.

Apple’s small models are doing pretty cool stuff but they’re going to take a couple more years to be really relevant relative to the best of what else is out there now, and that is also dependent on them retaining talent. They are doing groundbreaking R&D work with on-device models particularly in RAM constrained areas, but everywhere else they are trailing pretty badly.

New Apple displays too then in 2026?

Has it been confirmed that the M5 has the UltraFusion connector?

M5 Max has not yet been released.

That will be a beast of a computer.

Has it been confirmed that the M5 has the UltraFusion connector?

There has been a rumor that the reason the M5 Pro and Max chip chips did not come out this fall was that they were using a new fabrication technique with them that allows for a more flexible packaging of mixed components. Current techniques require brut force methods like ultra fusion but this new packaging is supposed to allow them to add RAM and GPU without needing to duplicate the whole chip. Presumably that would apply even more to an M5 Ultra.