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PRESS RELEASE March 8, 2022
Cupertino, California Apple today announced M1 Ultra, the next giant leap for Apple silicon and the Mac. Featuring UltraFusion — Apple’s innovative packaging architecture that interconnects the die of two M1 Max chips to create a system on a chip (SoC) with unprecedented levels of performance and capabilities — M1 Ultra delivers breathtaking computing power to the new Mac Studio while maintaining industry-leading performance per watt. The new SoC consists of 114 billion transistors, the most ever in a personal computer chip. 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, providing astonishing performance for developers compiling code, artists working in huge 3D environments that were previously impossible to render, and video professionals who can transcode video to ProRes up to 5.6x faster than with a 28-core Mac Pro with Afterburner.1

Groundbreaking UltraFusion Architecture

The foundation for M1 Ultra is the extremely powerful and power-efficient M1 Max. 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 recognized by software as one chip, so developers don’t need to rewrite code to take advantage of its performance. There’s never been anything like it.
The 32-core Neural Engine in M1 Ultra runs up to 22 trillion operations per second, speeding through the most challenging machine learning tasks. And, with double the media engine capabilities of M1 Max, M1 Ultra offers unprecedented ProRes video encode and decode throughput. In fact, the new Mac Studio with M1 Ultra can play back up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video — a feat no other chip can accomplish.4 M1 Ultra also integrates custom Apple technologies, such as a display engine capable of driving multiple external displays, integrated Thunderbolt 4 controllers, and best-in-class security, including Apple’s latest Secure Enclave, hardware-verified secure boot, and runtime anti-exploitation technologies.

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  1. Testing was conducted by Apple in February 2022 using preproduction Mac Studio systems with Apple M1 Ultra, 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, 128GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD, as well as production 2.5GHz 28-core Intel Xeon W-based Mac Pro systems with 384GB of RAM and AMD Radeon Pro W6900X graphics with 32GB of GDDR6, configured with Afterburner and 4TB SSD. Prerelease Compressor 4.6.1 tested using a three-minute clip with 5K Apple ProRes RAW media, at 5760x3240 resolution and 24 frames per second, transcoded to Apple ProRes 422. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac Studio and Mac Pro.
  2. Testing was conducted by Apple in February 2022 using preproduction Mac Studio systems with Apple M1 Max, 10-core CPU and 32-core GPU, and preproduction Mac Studio systems with Apple M1 Ultra, 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU. Performance measured using select industry‑standard benchmarks. 10-core PC desktop CPU performance data tested from Core i5-12600K and DDR5 memory. 16-core PC desktop CPU performance data tested from Core i9-12900K and DDR5 memory. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac Studio.
  3. Testing was conducted by Apple in February 2022 using preproduction Mac Studio systems with Apple M1 Max, 10-core CPU and 32-core GPU, and preproduction Mac Studio systems with Apple M1 Ultra, 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU. Performance was measured using select industry‑standard benchmarks. Popular discrete GPU performance data tested from Core i9-12900K with DDR5 memory and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. Highest-end discrete GPU performance data tested from Core i9-12900K with DDR5 memory and GeForce RTX 3090. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac Studio.
  4. Testing was conducted by Apple in February 2022 using preproduction Mac Studio systems with Apple M1 Ultra, 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU, and 128GB of RAM, and configured with 8TB SSD. Prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.6.2 was tested using a one-minute picture-in-picture project with 18 streams of Apple ProRes 422 video at 8192x4320 resolution and 30 frames per second, as well as a one-minute picture-in-picture project with nine streams of Apple ProRes 422 video at 8192x4320 resolution and 30 frames per second. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac Studio.
  5. Testing was conducted by Apple in February 2022 using preproduction Mac Studio systems with Apple M1 Ultra with 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU. Power was measured using a representative workload in a commercial application. High-end PC desktop data was acquired from testing Alienware Aurora R13 with Core i9-12900KF and GeForce RTX 3090. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac Studio.