During the final days of Tim Cook’s tenure as CEO of Apple, the company has released new Mac Minis and a new Mac Studio with new chips. Including the M5 Ultra and the M6. The M6 is the company’s first 2nm chip, while the M5 Ultra uses a new “quad-die” configuration that marries four M5 processors into a single, powerful chip. Making it ideal for AI and content creation.
The M5 Ultra is quite the processor, but, of course, the headline feature is that you can configure it with an 80-core GPU. That is an upcharge of $1,300, with the standard configuration for the M5 Ultra being a 30-core CPU and a 64-core GPU. Still, both configurations are quite impressive and should provide plenty of headroom for AI.
This chip also supports up to 512GB of integrated memory, though Apple is not selling that just yet. That is expected to arrive in late October. By default, the Mac Studio comes with 96GB of RAM, with an option to upgrade to 256GB for $4,000.
Overall, the M5 Ultra is said to boost AI compute by about 4.5x compared to the M3 Ultra, while boosting graphics performance by around 40%. So it will handle all the AI work and content creation you throw at it with ease.
Apple’s first 2nm chip
Ahead of the iPhone 18 Pro’s announcement next month, Apple has announced its first 2nm chipset, the M6. Apparently, this will be the only member of the M6 family. As Bloomberg reported earlier this year, Apple does not plan to release an M6 Pro or M6 Max. The company is expected to skip straight to the M7 by mid-2027.
The M6 has a new 12-core processor complex with two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores. Unfortunately, unified memory is limited to 32GB, but the 170GB/s bandwidth is a 10% improvement over the M5.
Mac Minis and the new Mac Studio are slated to start shipping on September 22.
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