Apple’s big surprise: The brand new M1 Ultra chip

Apple, I think surprised us all with the introduction of its all-new M1 Ultra processor, which it claims is the most powerful PC chip money can buy. The processor is available as the most expensive option in the all-new Mac Studio computer Apple introduced March 8. So, what do we know about it?

What Apple said

“M1 Ultra is another game-changer for Apple silicon that once again will shock the PC industry. By connecting two M1 Max die with our UltraFusion packaging architecture, we’re able to scale Apple silicon to unprecedented new heights,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies.

“With its powerful CPU, massive GPU, incredible Neural Engine, ProRes hardware acceleration, and huge amount of unified memory, M1 Ultra completes the M1 family as the world’s most powerful and capable chip for a personal computer.”

What is the M1 Ultra?

The latest addition to Apple’s silicon family, M1 Ultra is basically two M1 Max chips that interconnect using a brand-new packaging architecture Apple calls UltraFusion.

UltraFusion lets the dies of two M1 Max chips work together as a system on a chip, which means you get outstanding computational power using 114 billion transistors, “the most ever in a personal computer chip,” according to Apple.

M1 Ultra can be configured with up to 128GB of high-bandwidth, low-latency unified memory that can be accessed by the 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine.

This makes for outstanding performance, and may, Apple says, also enable some users to achieve things that simply weren’t possible before. The company cites rendering and video transcoding as examples of this.

What does UltraFusion do?

From Apple’s PR:

“To build M1 Ultra, the die of two M1 Max are connected using UltraFusion, Apple’s custom-built packaging architecture. The most common way to scale performance is to connect two chips through a motherboard, which typically brings significant trade-offs, including increased latency, reduced bandwidth, and increased power consumption. However, Apple’s innovative UltraFusion uses a silicon interposer that connects the chips across more than 10,000 signals, providing a massive 2.5TB/s of low latency, inter-processor bandwidth — more than 4x the bandwidth of the leading multi-chip interconnect technology. This enables M1 Ultra to behave and be recognised by software as one chip, so developers don’t need to rewrite code to take advantage of its performance.”

TL;DR: Billions of transistors work together efficiently delivering significant performance and energy demand benefits in comparison to any other chip.

What data points has Apple shared?

Apple claims these processors can deliver a great deal.

Here are some of the first claims I’ve found. It promises:

• M1 Ultra has a 64-core GPU — 8x the size of M1 — delivering faster performance than even the highest-end PC GPU available while using 200 fewer watts of power.
• 90 percent higher multi-threaded performance than the fastest available 16-core PC desktop chip in the same power envelope.
• This peak performance uses 100 fewer watts.
• Fans are silent nearly all the time.
• Memory bandwidth is increased to 800GB/s, more than 10x the latest PC desktop chip.
• M1 Ultra can be configured with 128GB of unified memory – the most powerful PC graphics cards hit 48GB.
• The 32-core Neural Engine in M1 Ultra runs up to 22 trillion operations per second.

On energy

The energy efficiency of Apple’s custom silicon helps Mac Studio use less power over its lifetime. In fact, while delivering extraordinary performance, Mac Studio consumes up to 1,000 kilowatt-hours less energy than that of a high-end PC desktop over the course of a year.

One more thing

This is the M1 Ultra. Apple already has a discernible road map towards an M3 Ultra, and this journey will be realized across the next 3-5 years. The company has moved far ahead.

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