Apple announced a variety of new goods during its ‘Peek Performance’ launch event last night. The Cupertino Corporation also revealed the M1 Ultra, one of the world’s most powerful PC processors, with the iPhone SE 2022, iPad Air, and Mac Studio computer.
The M1 is an ARM-based custom CPU created exclusively for Apple devices, just like the other M series chips. Unlike other M processors, however, the M1 Ultra will be used in Apple’s recently announced Mac Studio machine.
The M1 Ultra is made up of two M1 Max chips coupled by Apple’s new UltraFusion connection architecture. UltraFusion employs a silicon interposer with a capacity of 2.5 TB/s, which minimizes latency and bandwidth between two different chips connected via the motherboard.
As a result, with a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine, the M1 Ultra more than doubles the resources of the M1 Max. These figures are twice as high as the M1 Max’s.
Apple, as usual, has shared performance comparisons with its main competitors. According to the company’s benchmarks, the M1 outperforms the Intel Core i9-12900K at the same power consumption by 90%. It can even achieve Intel’s peak performance while consuming 100W less power.
The M1 Ultra outperforms the Core i9-12900K in multi-threaded tasks as well, though Apple did not specify which ones. In addition, the benchmarks compared Apple’s 20-core GPU to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090.
The M1 Ultra outperforms Nvidia’s flagship GPU at peak performance while consuming 200W less power. However, Apple once again did not specify which tasks the two GPUs were compared on.
The memory bandwidth of the M1 Ultra is much higher than that of previous Apple chips, reaching a whopping 800GB/s. The CPU and GPU will have access to the entire memory bandwidth pool, as with other M series chips.
With this much power, the M1 Ultra can perform insane tasks like running 18 different streams of 8K ProRes 422 video at the same time. The processor can even support up to five 6K Pro Display XDR displays.
The M1 Ultra, as previously stated, will power Apple’s Mac Studio computer for professionals.
To read our blog on “Intel Roadmap reveals next-generation chips to compete with Apple M1 processors,” click here.