Apple confirmed that it’s launching a new M1 Ultra processor for high-end Macs during its ‘Peek Performance’ event.
The M1 Ultra will become the most powerful chip in the Apple Silicon family, stealing the title away from the M1 Max. The Mac Studio is the only confirmed device to be powered by the M1 Ultra, although Apple did hint at the possibility of coming to the Mac Pro at a later date.
Keep reading on for everything you need to know about the new M1 Ultra processor.
Price
The Apple M1 Ultra is currently only available inside the new Mac Studio, which is a workstation desktop PC with a similar (but larger) design to the Mac Mini.
The cheapest M1 Ultra configuration is available for £3799, but that’s with the GPU core count dialled back to 48. If you want the max 64-core GPU chip, then you’ll need to spend a whopping £4799.
This makes the M1 Ultra the most expensive Apple Silicon processor by a significant margin.
Specs
The M1 Ultra shares the same 5nm architecture as previous Apple M1 processors, but packs an astonishing 20 CPU cores and 64 GPU cores. This makes the Ultra the most powerful chip that Apple has ever launched.
Apple revealed that it used a process called UltraFusion to effectively fuse together two Apple Silicon chips together in order to achieve such as a fast performance. Due to its size, the Ultra is unlikely to feature inside any portables such as the MacBook Pro.
The M1 Ultra features a whopping 114 billion transistors, which is a massive leap on the 57 billion transistors found on the next most powerful Apple Silicon processor, the M1 Max.
There will also be up to 128GB unified memory available on the M1 Ultra chip, and up to 800GB/s bandwidth.
Apple suggests the M1 Ultra chip is 7x more powerful than the standard M1 chip, which is seriously impressive considering the M1 is a performance leader in the ultrabook market.
Benchmark
We haven’t been able to test the M1 Ultra chip for ourselves just yet, but a benchmark result has seemingly leaked via Geekbench 5.
The M1 Utra saw single-core and multi-core CPU performance results of 1793 and 24,055 respectively. The latter figure is particularly impressive, as it’s almost twice as high as what the M1 Max is capable.
| Geekbench 5: Single Core | Geekbench 5: Multi Core | |
| Apple M1 Ultra | 1793 | 24,055 |
| Apple M1 | 1731 | 7308 |
| Apple M1 Pro | 1745 | 12,520 |
| Apple M1 Max | 1784 | 12,713 |
Unfortunately, Geekbench does not evaluate GPU performance, so we’ll have to wait a little longer to get a better idea of the graphics performance. We do at least have Apple’s own claims though, with the company suggesting the M1 Ultra is 5x faster than the 27-inch iMac (with Radeon Pro 5700 XT) when it comes to rendering 8K video via Final Cut Pro.
The Trusted Take
Apple is making sure its first generation of Apple Silicon processors goes out with a bang, as the M1 Ultra looks like a frighteningly powerful processor.
Of course, given the size of the chip, we don’t expect to see this chip featuring inside a laptop anytime soon, but the new Mac Studio desktop PC looks like the perfect home for the chip. This could very well set a new benchmark for workstation performance, especially with that jaw-dropping integrated 64-core GPU. Apple really is knocking it out of the park.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
