Apple unveils M5 Ultra: its most powerful Mac Studio chip yet

Apple has released its most powerful processor to date, the M5 Ultra, built for the latest Mac Studio lineup. The company's Ultra chips are created by fusing two processors together using its "Ultrafusion" technology, which is why this line trails a generation behind Apple's other chips.

New architecture and speed

While the M3 Ultra combined two M3 Max dies, the M5 Ultra fuses two dual-die M5 Max chips, creating Apple's first quad-die architecture. Connection density has increased sixfold, and the interconnect speed between dies now reaches 4.4TB/s, up from 2.5TB/s on the M3 Ultra.

The new chip offers up to 36 processing cores, compared to 32 previously, split between 12 super cores and 24 performance cores. This results in 25 percent faster single-threaded performance and up to 30 percent faster multithreaded performance.

Memory and graphics

Both chips support up to 512GB of unified memory, but the M5 Ultra boosts memory bandwidth by 50 percent to 1.2TB/s, allowing large datasets and AI models with hundreds of billions of parameters to run entirely on the device.

The GPU still has 80 cores, but each now includes a Neural Accelerator that boosts AI compute speeds up to 4.5 times. Combined with new shader and ray-tracing technology, graphics performance is up to 40 percent faster, while an upgraded Media Engine allows playback of 33 simultaneous 8K video streams, up from 24 on the M3 Ultra.

Price increase

The chip is built on TSMC's third-generation 3-nanometer process, more efficient than the first-generation 3nm process used for the M3 Ultra. However, the performance boost comes with a higher price tag: the new Mac Studio with 96GB of memory starts at $5,499, a $1,500 increase over the equivalent M3 Ultra configuration launched last year.