Apple rocked the computing world with its M1 chip, the first “Apple Silicon” hardware that turned the MacBook Air, Mac Mini, and other computers into portable powerhouses.
The new chip from Apple will allow it to create higher-performance mobile devices, a company executive says. The company bonded two M1 Max dies together on the new M1 Ultra, which is twice as powerful as the M1 Max
The new M1 Ultra is built around a custom chip architecture called UltraFusion. This method interconnects the dies of two M1 Max chips to form a system on a chip
Last year, the company followed with the M1 Pro and M1 Max, which brought even more power to the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Now Apple is adding a new member to the family: the M1 Ultra.
Two Chips Combined
The M1 Ultra is essentially two M1 Max chips combined, making it even more suitable for intensive creative applications such as video editing and 3D rendering. During today’s launch, Apple revealed that the M1 Max chips contain a secret feature: a die-to-die interconnect dubbed “UltraFusion” that allows multiple chips to be connected.
Conceptually, it is similar to AMD’s Infinity Fabric, which enables fast communication between the CPU, GPU, and other components.
Apple says the UltraFusion interconnect can handle up to 2.5 terabytes per second of bandwidth, so it shouldn’t degrade performance between two M1 Max dies. In total, the M1 Ultra is equipped with a whopping 114 billion transistors and supports up to 128GB of combined memory at 800GB/s bandwidth.
As you’d expect, its specs are basically what happens when two M1 Max chips are placed together
The Ultra has a 20-core processor (16 high-performance and 4 high-performance) and a 64-core GPU. The company claims to offer up to 8 times faster graphics than the original M1 chip.
“M1 Ultra is another game changer for Apple silicon that once again will shock the PC industry. By connecting two M1 Max die with our UltraFusion packaging architecture, we’re able to scale Apple silicon to unprecedented new heights,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies.
“With its powerful CPU, massive GPU, incredible Neural Engine, ProRes hardware acceleration and huge amount of unified memory, M1 Ultra completes the M1 family as the world’s most powerful and capable chip for a personal computer.”
Given that the M1 Ultra will make its debut in Apple’s new mini-desktop Mac Studio, the company didn’t have to worry about battery life at all. Still, Apple says the Ultra is at least more efficient than the competition, drawing up to 65 percent less power than a 10-core x86 chip. Of course, Apple didn’t reveal which CPU the M1 Ultra was compared against, but the numbers make sense given what we’ve seen of the M1 Max so far.
Power Efficiency
Provides 90% more multithreaded performance than the fastest 16-core desktop chip available on the same power chassis. In addition, the M1 Ultra achieves peak PC chip performance at 100 watts less.
This astonishing performance means reduced power consumption and silent fan operation, even when applications such as Logic Pro perform demanding tasks such as processing huge amounts of virtual instruments, plug-in audio and effects.
Performance
M1 Ultra features an extraordinarily powerful 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. It delivers 90 per cent higher multithreaded performance than the fastest available 16-core PC desktop chip
