Apple introduced two new chips on Tuesday alongside the refreshed Mac mini and Mac Studio, and the company is not being subtle about it. The press release calls M6 an extraordinary leap and describes M5 Ultra as staggering, while the Mac Studio it powers gets billed as the most powerful Mac ever built, which of course is classic Apple language.
M6 is Apple’s first 2-nanometer chip, a detail the company mentions but does not lead with. The smaller process fits more transistors into less die space, and Apple spent that room on a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, each with two more cores than M5. The CPU breaks down into 2 super cores, 4 performance cores, and 6 efficiency cores. Apple claims the world’s fastest single-threaded performance and multithreaded gains of 1.2x over M5.
Also, M6 introduces a Dual 16-core Neural Engine. According to Apple, system frameworks can run both engines simultaneously, so apps see faster model execution without developers changing anything. GPU compute for AI is up nearly 30 percent over M5, memory bandwidth reaches 170GB/s, and the chip supports up to 32GB of unified memory.
M5 Ultra is the bigger engineering story as it’s Apple’s first quad-die chip, using UltraFusion to connect two dual-die M5 Max chips so that all four dies operate as a single processor, which is pretty smart. Inter-die bandwidth now exceeds 4.4TB/s and connection density is up more than six times over the previous generation.
The result is up to a 36-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU with a Neural Accelerator in every core, and 512GB of unified memory running at 1.2TB/s. That memory figure is the one Apple keeps returning to, since it allows models with hundreds of billions of parameters to run entirely on device.
“Today, we’re debuting the next giant leap in performance and AI compute for Apple silicon,” said Sri Santhanam, Apple’s vice president of Silicon Engineering Group. He described M5 Ultra as pushing the boundaries of what a desktop can do.
The most eye-catching multipliers, like 8x GPU compute or 2.4x CPU performance, are measured against M1-era chips rather than current ones (Apple clearly wants people to upgrade). Against the parts they actually replace, the gains are more modest: 1.2x multithreaded for M6 over M5, and 1.3x multithreaded for M5 Ultra over M3 Ultra.
Both chips arrive September 22 in the new Mac mini and Mac Studio. The 512GB Mac Studio configuration follows in late October.
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