Apple today announced the M3 Ultra chip. The most powerful chip Apple has ever made, the M3 Ultra features the most powerful CPU and GPU ever in a Mac, double the number of Neural Engine cores, and a record-breaking unified memory capacity for a personal computer. The M3 Ultra also supports Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, with more than twice the bandwidth per port for faster connections and powerful expansion capabilities. The M3 Ultra uses Apple's innovative UltraFusion packaging architecture, which combines two M3 Max dies with more than 10,000 high-speed connection points to provide low latency and high-bandwidth transmission capabilities. This allows the system to recognize the connected dies as a single complete chip, achieving surging performance while maintaining Apple's industry-leading energy efficiency. The M3 Ultra integrates a total of 184 billion transistors, taking the new Mac Studio's industry-leading performance to new heights.

"The M3 Ultra is the pinnacle of our scalable SoC architecture, built for customers who need to run ultra-multithreaded and high-bandwidth applications," said Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. "With a 32-core CPU and a massive GPU core count, support for the highest memory capacity ever in a PC, Thunderbolt 5 connectivity and industry-leading power efficiency, the M3 Ultra is the pinnacle."

Ultimate performance and energy efficiency

The M3 Ultra delivers the most powerful Mac silicon ever, while maintaining Apple's industry-leading energy efficiency. With up to 32 CPU cores, including 24 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, the M3 Ultra delivers up to 1.5 times the performance of the M2 Ultra and 1.8 times the performance of the M1 Ultra. The chip also features the most powerful GPU ever in an Apple chip, including up to 80 GPU cores, delivering up to 2 times the performance of the M2 Ultra and up to 2.6 times the performance of the M1 Ultra.

The M3 Ultra's advanced graphics architecture supports dynamic caching, as well as hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, for high-speed processing of performance-intensive content creation workflows and games. The powerful 32-core Neural Engine powers AI and machine learning (ML). From the CPU's ML accelerators and Apple's most powerful GPU yet, to the Neural Engine and over 800GB/s of memory bandwidth, the M3 Ultra is built for AI. AI professionals can use Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra chip to run Large Language Models (LLMs) with over 600 billion parameters directly on-device, making it an ideal desktop machine for AI development.

The M3 Ultra's unified memory architecture integrates the highest bandwidth, lowest latency memory ever in a PC. Starting at 96GB and configurable up to 512GB, it outperforms today's most advanced workstation graphics cards and pushes the limits of memory-intensive professional workloads like 3D rendering, visual effects, and AI.

The M3 Ultra brings support for Thunderbolt 5 ports to Mac Studio, delivering data transfer speeds up to 120 Gb/s, more than 2x faster than Thunderbolt 4. Each Thunderbolt 5 port is directly powered by a dedicated custom controller on the M3 Ultra chip. This allows each port on Mac Studio to be allocated its own dedicated bandwidth, making it the industry's leading Thunderbolt 5 solution.

The Mac Studio's Thunderbolt 5 ports give pro users faster data transfer speeds to connect external storage devices, enable docking solutions, and prepare for the next generation of expansion devices. Thunderbolt 5 can also connect multiple Mac Studio systems to enable workflows that push the limits of content creation and computer science exploration.

To maximize performance and power efficiency, the M3 Ultra integrates several Apple advanced technologies directly on the chip, including:

Apple's custom-designed UltraFusion packaging technology uses an embedded silicon interposer to connect two M3 Max dies, which can transmit more than 10,000 signals simultaneously, bringing more than 2.5TB/s of low-latency inter-chip bandwidth, allowing the M3 Ultra to be recognized as a complete chip by various software.

With twice the resources of the M3 Max, the parallel video processing capabilities of the media processing engine in the M3 Ultra are greatly enhanced. The chip provides dedicated hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC and four ProRes codec engines, capable of playing up to 22 8K ProRes 422 video streams.

Display Engine

The display engine supports up to 8 Pro Display XDRs, delivering over 160 million pixels.

The Secure Enclave works in tandem with hardware-verified secure boot and runtime exploit prevention technologies to provide advanced security.

Thanks to the power efficiency of the M3 Ultra, the new Mac Studio meets Apple's stringent energy efficiency standards, reducing energy consumption throughout the product lifecycle. Today, Apple has achieved carbon neutrality in global corporate operations and plans to make its entire carbon footprint completely carbon neutral by 2030 to achieve its ambitious Apple 2030 goals.

At 800 GB/s of memory bandwidth, it is entirely feasible to run a program like DeepSeek R1 at home, at least to 4 digits of precision. It has 671 billion parameters and will take up a little over 400GB of memory, but because it uses a hybrid expert architecture, only 37 billion parameters are active at any given point. This means that, according to our estimates, the generation rate could be as high as 20 to 30 tokens per second, which should be achievable.

That said, a Mac Studio capable of running this model is not cheap. Upgrading to 512GB will cost you $5,500 more than the standard M3 Ultra Mac Studio, for a total price of $9,499, and that doesn't even include the upgraded storage. Fully upgraded, an M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 16TB of SSD storage will cost you $14,099.

While Apple's top-of-the-line Mac Studio comes with the M3 Ultra, the base model comes with the same M4 Max that's been powering its MacBook Pros since last fall. That chip can be equipped with up to 16 CPU cores (12 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores), a 40-core GPU, and up to 128GB of unified memory. Storage is also capped at 8TB, but given the rather hefty premium Apple charges for storage and the fact that this thing will be sitting on a desk most of the time, we recommend investing in external USB4 or Thunderbolt storage.

When asked why the top-end Mac Studio uses an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra chip, Apple told us that not every chip generation will have an "Ultra" tier. As far as I know, this is the first time Apple has said something like this in public.

Source: Content from Apple

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