- Apple has announced M6 and M5 Ultra SoC as its next-gen Silicon chipsets.
- Powering Mac mini, the M5 is fabbed on a 2nm node and with up to 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU and 32-core NPU.
- Apple M5 Ultra powers Mac Studio with up to 36 cores CPU and 80 cores of GPU and a 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth.
Cupertino-based giant Apple has announced the cutting-edge Apple M6 and M5 Ultra SoCs as a part of its next-gen Apple Silicon. In fact, the M6 is already a part of the newly announced Mac mini, while the M5 Ultra makes it to the new Mac Studio.
The latest piece of silicon offers up to 170GB/s of unified memory speeds, insane AI capabilities that dwarf predecessors, up to 80 cores of GPU, and 36 cores of GPU, destined to allow users to engage in high-octane and demanding AI tasks and workflows with ease.
Apple M6 announced—First silicon built on 2nm process
Starting with M6, Apple announced the next-gen chipset fabbed on a 2nm process, the first for Apple silicon. Specs-wise, the Apple M6 SoC comprises a 12-core CPU setup featuring 2x super cores, 4x performance, and 6x efficiency cores. For context, this is 2 cores more than last year’s M5 SoC; however, it also reduces the number of super cores and adds four performance cores.
As Apple claims, this has resulted in up to 1.2x faster multi-thread performance than M5 and a whopping 2.4x faster performance than the original M1. In fact, the Cupertino-based giant is calling the CPU the world’s fastest single-threaded performance.
On the GPU front, we have a 12-core setup, each featuring a Neural Accelerator. Tested internally under ideal conditions, the GPU itself was able to churn out 30% faster computing AI tasks compared to the M5 and a whopping 8x faster than the M1 SoC to begin with.
Another piece of the puzzle is its NPU, which has a dual 16-core Neural Engine. This is the same as M5, which eventually translates into 2x peak on-device AI performance compared to M5. Finally, we have 32GB of unified memory reaching splendid speeds of 170GB/s compared to 153GB/s on the M5.
Apple announces M5 Ultra
The Apple M5 Ultra joins the wagon alongside the M6. It is made up of dual-die M5 Max chips connected using UltraFusion interconnect technology, wherein four dies of M5 Max are used to make up the single most powerful chip on-board. Specs-wise, it comes paired with up to 36 CPU cores—12x super cores and 24x performance cores. This makes the M5 Ultra 1.25x higher in terms of single-threaded performance and approx. 1.3x when compared to the M3 Ultra chip in multi-threaded performance.
Moving further, we have an instance GPU configuration with 80 cores and up to 32 Neural Engine cores. Here, Apple claims the chipset is capable of reaching 4.3x peak AI compute performance when compared head-on with M3 Ultra. The chipset can comprehend up to 512GB of unified memory with speeds up to 1.2TB/s. The chipset is now available on the all-new Mac Studio.
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