Seriously, I’m not joking in the subheading above. Apple does the same procedure; at least that’s what they said. Yesterday (March 8), Apple announced a new chipset to the M1 lineup. The M1 chips are the most powerful, ARM-based Apple’s in-house custom silicon that powers most of the Mac, Macbooks, iPads out there. Apple blew up the tech world when it launched M1. And it slowly increased its capability and launched M1 Pro and M1 Max last year. And now Apple brings M1 Ultra [Oh, Sammy 🙁 ]. The Apple M1 Max was already the best chip that has ever been made, and there are literally no tasks we can’t do on it. And now, Apple fused two M1 Max(s) and made M1 Ultra for Studio level performance; Apple calls it UltraFusion.
The Apple M1 Ultra uses a silicon interposer between the two chips that provide 2.5TB/s of bandwidth. This could potentially reduce latency compared to having two separate chips connected through the motherboard. Since it’s two M1 Max(s) combined, M1 Ultra doubles the resources of the M1 Max. Apple’s new M1 Ultra features a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine.
Memory bandwidth on the M1 Ultra is also higher than previous models, which is now 800GB/s. The M1 Ultra can be configured with up to 128GB of unified memory. So this 128GB memory pool can be utilized by RAM and the GPU.
Apple’s Numbers
And just like any other Apple Event, this time too, Apple brought the numbers and graphs to portray the potential of the new M1 Ultra. Apple claims that the M1 Ultra can offer 90% better performance for the same power consumption compared to a 16-core CPU (Intel Core i9-12900K). And M1 Ultra can match Intel’s peak performance by using 100W less.
And the 64-core GPU consumes 200W less than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 at its peak performance and also outperforms it.
As the media engine block is also doubled now, the M1 Ultra can perform crazy in terms of media decoding. For example, it can simultaneously play back up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video. It also has support for up to five displays, four of which can be the 6K Pro Display XDR along with a fifth 4K display.
And one last thing that Apple mentioned is although it’s a processor with two chips combined, it appears as a single processor for any software that runs on it. So all the programs will run and scale automatically with no need to update, and they can also take advantage of the increased performance.
For more information regarding the M1 Ultra, you can read the official article by Apple that explains M1 Ultra.
So that’s been it. Thank you for reading, and do share the article if you get a bit of information. Also, keep an eye on this space for more relevant updates. Stay safe, and we hope to see you around.
