Apple Announces M1 Ultra Chipset; Features 128GB Of Unified Memory

Amidst the wave of announcements that Apple made today, one specific product the company from Cupertino was eager to share with the world is the latest addition to its M1 family of processors, made with Apple Silicon: the M1 Ultra.

A direct successor to the M1 Max launched last year, the M1 Ultra is basically two M1 Max SoCs, literally joined at the hip via the use of a new die-to-die interconnector at the edge of the chipset. To that end, the new processor is also visually double the height of the M1 Max and, as you’d expect, has double the number of cores and components embedded.

Specs-wise, the M1 Ultra features a 20-core CPU, comprising 16 high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores; a 64-core GPU consisting of 8192 execution units and up to 196608 concurrent threads; a Neural engine with 32-cores; and a Media engine with double the number of video decode and video encode engines. To that end, the processor comes with 128GB of Unified Memory, the largest in any Apple silicon, to date.

As for the performance of the M1 Ultra, Apple says that its new silicon’s performance-per-watt is 90% more efficient than even the latest 16-core desktop CPU on the market, which in this case, the comparison is being made against Intel’s 12th generation Core i9-12900K. For that matter, Apple also says that the GPU cores on the M1 Ultra consume 200W less power than the highest-end discrete GPU that in this case, is NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090.