Apple Debuts M5 Ultra as Most Powerful Chip Ever - MacRumors
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Apple Debuts M5 Ultra as Most Powerful Chip Ever

Apple today announced the M5 Ultra, which the company says is its most powerful chip ever.

m5 ultra chip
The M5 Ultra is built by connecting two dual-die M5 Max chips using Apple's next-generation UltraFusion technology, which is the first time Apple has used a quad-die architecture in an M-series chip. UltraFusion 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 chip includes an CPU with up to 36 cores, containing 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, delivering up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra.

Its GPU scales up to 80 cores, with a Neural Accelerator built into each core for the first time on an Ultra chip. Apple says this delivers up to 4.3x the peak AI compute performance compared to the M3 Ultra, along with up to 1.8x faster graphics than the previous-generation chip.

The M5 Ultra also includes a 32-core Neural Engine and a more capable Media Engine, with twice the video encode and decode blocks as M5 Max, allowing users to simultaneously play up to 33 streams of 8K ProRes 422 at 30 fps.

The chip supports up to 512GB of unified memory and up to 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, a 50% increase over M3 Ultra. Apple says the added memory and bandwidth let users store large datasets locally, increase tokens per second, and run large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on device.

The M5 Ultra is exclusively available in the new Mac Studio, which is available for pre-order today, with availability beginning on September 22. Configurations with 512GB of memory launch in late October.

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Top Rated Comments

turbineseaplane Avatar
19 hours ago at 07:09 am
I see that, along with pricing increases, they also rolled out the new Apple logo!



Attachment Image
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
I7guy Avatar
20 hours ago at 06:58 am
Seems like it will be a beast. Can’t wait for the benchmarks.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
CWallace Avatar
13 hours ago at 01:15 pm

Apple should design and manufacture its own RAM and disks to match its CPU silicon.
There is no financial benefit to Apple to do so and absolutely no financial benefit to Apple's customers. Building a FAB costs billions and takes years and needs to operate at full capacity to cover the high operating costs.



I'd like to hear more about the "quad die" architecture of the M5 Ultra and what that actually means. I thought at first it might be the “Extreme” version of the chip that was long rumored, but the CPU and GPU count are only doubled over the Max, not quadrupled. Hmm.
With the M5 generation Pro and Max, the CPU and GPU cores are now separate functional blocks ("dies") whereas they were all part of the same monolithic die in prior generations.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
gallico916 Avatar
19 hours ago at 07:16 am
Will they trade for a mint-condition kidney?
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
20 hours ago at 07:00 am
Great to see the improvements. Apple Silicon has come a long way since its first version in 2020. Will be interesting to see how powerful future versions will be.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
User.node Avatar
15 hours ago at 11:36 am

This naming convention is confusing. For the average person M6 should be newer and better than anything with the M5 name.
It's similar to what intel was doing with their higher performance/server chips. the high compute chips were released later after the mainstream chips were released. I guess it's a way to let the manufacturing of those nodes mature because stability was required.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)