And while an “M4 Ultra” has appeared in some rumors about the next-gen Mac Studio update, that processor’s core counts match up with what Apple announced as the M3 Ultra today.
Makeup of the M3 Ultra
The M3 Ultra is a pair of M3 Max chips joined together with a silicon interposer, an arrangement similar to what Apple did with the M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra. As such, everything is doubled: 32 CPU cores instead of 16, 80 GPU cores instead of 40, 32 Neural Engine cores instead of 16, and two ProRes video encoding engines instead of one.
Apple has also added a couple of extras, getting the M3 Ultra certified for 120Gbps Thunderbolt 5 (the M3 Max supports Thunderbolt 4) and supporting up to 512GB of RAM (M3 Max tops out at 128GB). And for some new-to-Mac-Studio features like hardware-accelerated ray-tracing for graphics, the M3 and M4 GPUs both support the features.
The existence of the M3 Ultra puts to rest some lightly sourced speculation from last year, suggesting that the M3 Max was shipping without the silicon used to fuse two Max chips together into a single Ultra chip.
As for why Apple has decided that it doesn’t need an Ultra chip for every Apple Silicon generation, we can only speculate. But the Mac Studio has been around for a few years now, and Apple likely has a better sense of how the Max-versus-Ultra sales break down. It may simply be the case that the sales of the high-end Mac Studio and Mac Pro can’t justify the cost and effort needed to design and manufacture a new Ultra chip every time Apple wants to tweak its silicon.