PRESS RELEASE March 5, 2025

Apple reveals M3 Ultra,

taking Apple silicon to a new extreme

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple today announced M3 Ultra, the highest-performing chip it has ever created, offering the most powerful CPU and GPU in a Mac, double the Neural Engine cores, and the most unified memory ever in a personal computer. M3 Ultra also features Thunderbolt 5 with more than 2x the bandwidth per port for faster connectivity and robust expansion. M3 Ultra is built using Apple’s innovative UltraFusion packaging architecture, which links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections that offer low latency and high bandwidth. This allows the system to treat the combined dies as a single, unified chip for massive performance while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading power efficiency. UltraFusion brings together a total of 184 billion transistors to take the industry-leading capabilities of the new Mac Studio to new heights.

The advanced graphics architecture in M3 Ultra features dynamic caching, along with hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, so it can fly through the most demanding content creation workloads and games. A powerful 32-core Neural Engine fuels AI and machine learning (ML), and powers Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that puts powerful generative models right at the core of the new Mac Studio. In fact, M3 Ultra is built for AI, including ML accelerators in the CPU, Apple’s most powerful GPU, the Neural Engine, and over 800GB/s of memory bandwidth. AI professionals can use Mac Studio with M3 Ultra to run large language models (LLMs) with over 600 billion parameters directly on device, making it the ultimate desktop for AI development.

• Apple’s custom-built UltraFusion packaging technology uses an embedded silicon interposer that connects two M3 Max dies across more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth, and making M3 Ultra appear as a single chip to software.

• With 2x the resources of M3 Max, the media engine within M3 Ultra is capable of far more concurrent video processing. The chip offers dedicated, hardware-enabled H.264, HEVC, and four ProRes encode and decode engines, allowing M3 Ultra to play back up to 24 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video.

• The display engine supports up to eight Pro Display XDRs, driving more than 160 million pixels.

• The Secure Enclave works with hardware-verified secure boot and runtime anti-exploitation technologies to provide state-of-the-art security.