Apple today announced a new Mac Studio powered by the M5 Ultra chip, which the company says is its most powerful chip ever.
The M5 Ultra chip includes an up to 36-core CPU that contains 12 super cores and 24 performance cores. It delivers up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra from the previous generation Mac Studio.
The M5 Ultra features a GPU with up to 80 cores, and a Neural Accelerator is built into each core, offering up to 4.5x the peak GPU compute for AI tasks compared to the M3 Ultra and more than 6x compared to the M1 Ultra. Apple says the GPU's latest shader core technology, paired with second-generation Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and third-generation ray tracing, delivers up to 40% faster graphics performance than the M3 Ultra.
The chip also includes a more capable Media Engine, with dedicated hardware for H.264, HEVC, four ProRes encode and decode engines, and hardware-accelerated AV1 decode, along with a 32-core Neural Engine for on-device AI tasks.
The M5 Ultra is built by connecting two dual-die M5 Max chips using Apple's next-generation UltraFusion technology, which 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 new Mac Studio supports up to 512GB of unified memory and up to 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, which is a 50% increase over M3 Ultra. Apple says the added memory and bandwidth allows users to store large datasets locally, increase tokens per second, and run large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on device.
The new Mac Studio will be released on September 22, but the model with 512GB of unified memory launches in late October.
This article, "Apple Announces New Mac Studio With M5 Ultra Chip" first appeared on MacRumors.com
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