Apple has revealed a new processor that it is calling “the highest-performing chip it has ever created.” Already powering the new Mac Studio, the M3 Ultra chip offers 1.5 times the performance of the M2 Ultra. Add in Thunderbolt 5Â connectivity and support for more than half a terabyte of unified memory, and the processor packs a lot of power into one package.
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“M3 Ultra is the pinnacle of our scalable system-on-a-chip architecture, aimed specifically at users who run the most heavily threaded and bandwidth-intensive applications,” Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, said in a news release. “Thanks to its 32-core CPU, massive GPU, support for the most unified memory ever in a personal computer, Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, and industry-leading power efficiency, there is no other chip like the M3 Ultra.”
M3 Ultra tech specs
As for the tech specs, the M3 Ultra contains a 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores and eight efficiency cores. It is also home to the largest GPU in any Apple chip, with up to 80 graphics cores, delivering twice the performance of the GPU in the M2 Ultra. Apple designed the M3 Ultra with its UltraFusion packaging architecture, which links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections to offer low latency and higher bandwidth, and encompasses a whopping 184 billion transistors.
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Powering the Apple Intelligence AI on the new Mac Studio, the chip’s 32-core Neural Engine is geared for AI and machine learning. To carry out AI tasks, the M3 Ultra takes advantage of its ML accelerators, the powerful GPU, the Neural Engine, and more than 800GB per second of memory bandwidth. AI professionals can use the Mac Studio to run large language models (LLMs) with more than 600 billion parameters directly on the device.
One of the outstanding features of the M3 Ultra is the support for up to half a gigabyte of memory. Apple calls this memory architecture “the most high-bandwidth, low-latency memory ever available in a personal computer.” Depending on your needs, you can outfit an M3 Ultra-powered Mac Studio with as little as 96GB and as much as 512GB of RAM — ideal for memory-intensive tasks like 3D rendering, visual effects, and AI.
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With the M3 Ultra comes Thunderbolt 5, providing transfer speeds as fast as 120 gigabits per second, more than double what Thunderbolt 4 offers. Geared for the Mac Studio, each Thunderbolt 5 port uses its own custom-designed controller on the chip, thus taking advantage of its own dedicated bandwidth. The new version of Thunderbolt also lets you connect multiple Mac Studio computers together for even greater performance.
Pre-order the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra
With the M3 Ultra onboard, the new Mac Studio is now up for pre-order and will be available starting Wednesday, March 12.