Apple serves up a tasty new chip, introducing M2 Ultra
Apple’s new AR glasses matter, but Apple Silicon is still Apple’s big story and enables the company to explore powerful new systems. M2 Ultra raises Apple’s game all over again, with faster CPU, GPU, and support for a huge amount of memory.
What Apple said
“M2 Ultra delivers astonishing performance and capabilities for our pro users’ most demanding workflows, while maintaining Apple silicon’s industry-leading power efficiency,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies.
“With huge performance gains in the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, combined with massive memory bandwidth in a single SoC, M2 Ultra is the world’s most powerful chip ever created for a personal computer.”
So much faster with huge memory support
M2 Ultra is the largest and most capable chip Apple has ever created. The company says the chip is built using a second-generation 5-nanometer process. It consists of 134 billion transistors, which is 20 billion more than you got in M1 Ultra.
It features a more powerful CPU that’s 20 percent faster than M1 Ultra, a larger GPU that’s up to 30 percent faster, and a Neural Engine that’s up to 40 percent faster.
The memory is going to blow aways some Mac users. The chip supports up to 192GB of memory capacity, which is 50 percent more than M1 Ultra, and features 800GB/s of memory bandwidth — twice that of M2 Max and far greater than any PC.
Apple’s UltraFusion Tech
To achieve this, the new chip uses UltraFusion tech, which Apple introduced in the M1 Ultra before. The tech connects the die of two M2 Max chips, doubling the performance.
UltraFusion uses a silicon interposer that connects the dies with more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low latency interprocessor bandwidth. The architecture means the M2 Ultra appears as a single chip to software. This means code doesn’t need to be rewritten.
What about the chip?
These processors are beasts. You are getting a 24-core CPU consisting of 16 next-generation high-performance cores and eight next-generation high-efficiency cores, delivering up to 20 percent faster performance than M1 Ultra.
This translates into real productivity gains, for example, with Mac Studio powered by M2 Ultra, colorists using DaVinci Resolve will experience up to 50 percent faster video processing compared to Mac Studio with M1 Ultra. The display engine supports up to six Pro Display XDRs!
The GPU can be configured with 60 or 76 next-generation cores. This is up to 12 more cores and up to a 30 percent improvement compared to the incredibly powerful GPU of M1 Ultra.
M2 Ultra features a 32-core Neural Engine, delivering 31.6 trillion operations per second, which is 40 percent faster performance than M1 Ultra. It also has dedicated, hardware-enabled H.264, HEVC, and ProRes encode and decode, allowing M2 Ultra to play back up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video, and there isn’t a PC able to do that.
What else? Apple also introduced new Macs powered by this fantastic new chip, including a mighty Mac Pro and Mac Studio. You can also get a rather lovely 15-inch MacBook Air.
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