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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
6 days ago at 07:09 am
I see that, along with pricing increases, they also rolled out the new Apple logo!



Attachment Image
Score: 15 Votes (Like | Disagree)
I7guy Avatar
6 days ago at 06:58 am
Seems like it will be a beast. Can’t wait for the benchmarks.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
gallico916 Avatar
6 days ago at 07:16 am
Will they trade for a mint-condition kidney?
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
6 days ago at 07:10 am

Sadly, still with a 10GB network interface :(

With RDMA dodgyness / instability when connecting >2 Studio Ultra's together in an LLM cluster, faster LAN connections are a necessity for this use case anyway. I may pony up for one at home.
you mean ethernet? so? you use TB5 for that.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
chucker23n1 Avatar
6 days ago at 03:48 am

The angle I see is that Apple has been moving towards more vertical integration, so the full cycle is to get back into manufacture not just design. So that they can better do what the do to RAM and disk like they did with CPU, which is kind of the direction the SOC paradigm is evolving so far.

If the big pendulum is shifting back from timesharing systems (the "cloud") to local compute, and prices are already rising why not make a better complete package?
Because RAM is a commodity in a way CPU/GPU/NPU designs aren't. It's just storage.

Apple is interested in designing its own memory controllers, much like their "SSDs" are really just NAND chips but with a custom controller in the SoC, and custom fabric between them rather than a PCIe/NVMe bus. But the actual memory chips and NAND chips are, from Apple's POV, boring.


Just like dependency on Intel was an achilles heel, so is dependency on the few RAM and drive makers.
The dependency on Intel was an achilles heel because


* Intel at the time required Apple to have Intel both design and manufacture the chips
* in both disciplines, Intel was starting to lag behind the competition
* on top of that, Apple had specialized requirements


RAM and NAND aren't like that. Apple uses bog-standard chips. They could use proprietary chips, but it's not clear to me what you propose those would do differently. Then you're just left with: are there enough manufacturers? That's debatable; Apple would like more (but, again, Apple isn't gonna do the manufacturing itself). Are the competing designs good enough? Yes. With the M5 Ultra, Apple's setup lets them to 1.2 TB/s memory bandwidth. For the storage, it isn't clear yet, but it looks like it may go up to 28 GB/s with the highest config.


Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
6 days 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)

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