Apple today announced the M5 Ultra, which the company says is its most powerful chip ever.
The M5 Ultra is built by connecting two dual-die M5 Max chips using Apple's next-generation UltraFusion technology, which is the first time Apple has used a quad-die architecture in an M-series chip. UltraFusion increases inter-die bandwidth to over 4.4TB/s and connection density by more than 6x, allowing the four dies to function as a single processor.
The chip includes an CPU with up to 36 cores, containing 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, delivering up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra.
Its GPU scales up to 80 cores, with a Neural Accelerator built into each core for the first time on an Ultra chip. Apple says this delivers up to 4.3x the peak AI compute performance compared to the M3 Ultra, along with up to 1.8x faster graphics than the previous-generation chip.
The M5 Ultra also includes a 32-core Neural Engine and a more capable Media Engine, with twice the video encode and decode blocks as M5 Max, allowing users to simultaneously play up to 33 streams of 8K ProRes 422 at 30 fps.
The chip supports up to 512GB of unified memory and up to 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, a 50% increase over M3 Ultra. Apple says the added memory and bandwidth let users store large datasets locally, increase tokens per second, and run large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on device.
The M5 Ultra is exclusively available in the new Mac Studio, which is available for pre-order today, with availability beginning on September 22. Configurations with 512GB of memory launch in late October.
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