Apple M1 Ultra Announced As Company’s Fastest Chip Ever, Features Two M1 Max Processors: Specifications

Last Updated on March 14, 2022 by Asif Iqbal Shaik

At its ‘Peek Performance’ event, Apple unveiled its fastest processor ever: Apple M1 UItra. It has debuted inside the Apple Mac Studio, the company’s first SFF (Small Form Factor) PC designed for professionals who need a lot of computing power. The Apple M1 Ultra is a 5nm chipset that features a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine.

The company claims that the M1 Ultra offers 90% higher performance than Intel’s fastest 16-core CPU (Core i9-12900K) within the same power envelope. Moreover, Apple’s newest chip is also claimed to offer faster graphics performance than the Nvidia RTX 3090 while consuming 200W lower power. Let us have a detailed look at the Apple M1 Ultra.

Apple M1 Ultra Specifications, Features

The Apple M1 Ultra is fabricated using TSMC’s 5nm process to fit in a whopping 114 billion transistors in the package. It is an extremely powerful and power-efficient chipset. Apple says that it has been made by fusing two M1 Max chips together using UltraFusion, a custom-built packaging architecture that features 10,000 ultra-low-latency interconnects for up to 2.5TB/s bandwidth.

The chipset has a 20-core CPU, a 64-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine. The processor offers up to 128GB of high-bandwidth on-chip memory (RAM). Memory bandwidth has been increased up to 800GB/s, which is up to 10x higher than the best PC chip from AMD and Intel. The 32-core Neural Engine can process up to 22 trillion operations per second.

The Apple M1 Ultra, with its powerful CPU, GPU, and media engine, can play up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes422 video files simultaneously. With the help of a built-in Thunderbolt 4 controller, the M1 Ultra can drive up to four 6K displays and one 4K display simultaneously. Apple claims that an M1 UItra powered computer consumes up to 1,000kW less power compared to a similar high-end PC over the course of a year.

Apple has been making some really great processors over the past few years, and with the M1 lineup—M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra—the company has been really challenging AMD and Intel in the computing space. With the M1 Max and the M1 Ultra, the company claims that it has surpassed AMD and Nvidia in GPU performance. And it remains to be seen whether traditional CPU and GPU makers will be able to catch up with Apple in this segment.