In addition to the new MacBook Air, Apple also updated the Mac Studio today:
Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip. The ultimate pro desktop delivers groundbreaking pro performance, extensive connectivity now with Thunderbolt 5, and new capabilities in its compact and quiet design that can live right on a desk. Mac Studio can tackle the most intense workloads with its powerful CPU, Apple’s advanced graphics architecture, higher unified memory capacity, ultrafast SSD storage, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine. It provides a big boost in performance compared to the previous generation, and a massive leap for users coming from older Macs.
That’s right… these are the chips that ship in the updated Mac Studio:
When this leaked yesterday, part of me didn’t believe it, but here we are.
So, what is an M3 Ultra? Apple explains:
Apple today announced M3 Ultra, the highest-performing chip it has ever created, offering the most powerful CPU and GPU in a Mac, double the Neural Engine cores, and the most unified memory ever in a personal computer. M3 Ultra also features Thunderbolt 5 with more than 2x the bandwidth per port for faster connectivity and robust expansion. M3 Ultra is built using Apple’s innovative UltraFusion packaging architecture, which links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections that offer low latency and high bandwidth. This allows the system to treat the combined dies as a single, unified chip for massive performance while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading power efficiency. UltraFusion brings together a total of 184 billion transistors to take the industry-leading capabilities of the new Mac Studio to new heights.
“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,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “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’s no other chip like M3 Ultra.”
The M4 Max version starts at $1,999 with the M3 Ultra starting at $3,999. The latter can be specced to $14,099 with these options:
- Apple M3 Ultra chip with 32-core CPU, 80-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine
- 512 GB unified memory
- 16 TB SSD storage
The M4 Max tops out at 128 GB of memory and 8 TB of storage with 14 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine.
Even though I am not a Mac Studio user anymore, I am glad to see the machine get updated. I have lots of questions about why the top-of-the-line chip is based on an M3 and not an M4, though. Perhaps we’ll see an M4 Ultra this summer in an updated Mac Pro, in an attempt by Apple to separate its two high-end desktop Macs a little more. (Or not.)