Apple Unveils M1 Ultra: “World’s Most Powerful Chip for a PC,” 64-Core GPU Supposedly on Par with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090

[Tsing]

Image: Apple



It looks like AMD and Intel’s desktop CPU departments can pack it up, or, at least, hang their heads in shame, as Apple claims to have dusted the competition with its latest announcement, the M1 Ultra. Described as “the world’s most powerful chip for a personal computer,” the M1 Ultra is the latest in Apple’s line of powerful in-house SoCs, one that features a mind-boggling count of 144 billion transistors (most ever in a personal computer chip, apparently) and a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine. Apple’s M1 Ultra can be found in the Mac Studio, an all-new high-performance PC with a sexy, compact enclosure that the company also announced today during its March 2022 keynote event.



A portion of Apple’s press release for the M1 Ultra...

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[Grimlakin]

That's impressive, waiting to see some real world comparisons. would be funny if it out performs a 3090, and uses less power, getting better frames all will running windows as a vm.

I mean sure it's going to cost 5 grand minimum... but still.

You know that's kind of impressive for the cost. 64 gig of ram, 1 tb of storage, plenty of ports. NIce looking form factor if you're into that. 10 gigabit network on board, geebus... that's kind of a impressive setup.

 

[LazyGamer]

would be funny if it out performs a 3090, and uses less power, getting better frames all will running windows as a vm.

They put out impressive numbers, but not in gaming - not entirely sure they even have a Wine-like compatibility layer for gaming yet.

I do hope that they get around to really supporting desktop gaming though. With support for Linux gaining plenty of traction - even with game developers being drug along kicking and screaming - I think Apple really just needs to say work with Valve to get the APIs fully hooked up through Rosetta.

 

[Grimlakin]

They put out impressive numbers, but not in gaming - not entirely sure they even have a Wine-like compatibility layer for gaming yet.

I do hope that they get around to really supporting desktop gaming though. With support for Linux gaining plenty of traction - even with game developers being drug along kicking and screaming - I think Apple really just needs to say work with Valve to get the APIs fully hooked up through Rosetta.

That would be pretty cool. Though I have a feeling that sleek little case is used as a heat sync as well.

 

[Brian_B]

It's a 60W chip. So there's that. They sell the new Studio in two models - one with the older Max chip, and one with the newer Ultra. The older Max has an aluminum heatsink, the newer Ultra has a copper block, so it weighs a bit more - but same case and I/O and such. The Ultra is literally 2 Max's duct taped together with that interposer, which somehow operates in excess of the speed of light (/s for you pedantic folks out there).

In some world for some random unspecified benchmarks - yes Apple is claiming it can beat a 3090, a Threadripper 64 core, or an Alder Lake i9, and all in that 60W envelope. About the only benchmark it ~doesn't~ claim to beat would be single thread CPU performance - it can't quite beat Intel Alder Lake there, but it's highly competitive, coming in somewhere between Zen3 and Alder Lake's P Core speed on single thread.

That's some shady benchmark bullshit math, and benchmarks comparing x86 and M1 will always be a bit shady because you can't get exact parity on the hardware/software level -- but that interposer is something else, and what they can do in that power envelope is ... next level.

Again, @Grimlakin will be pleasantly surprised - entry level M1 Ultra is ~only~ $3,999, a full thousand less than you feared.

Stepping up to double the performance, the M1 Ultra Chip starts at $3,999 with a 48-core GPU, 64 gigabytes of memory, and 512 gigabytes of storage.

You can option it up to over $10k though. But this isn't aimed to be a entry level PC, this is geared at Workstation class. It isn't quite the new Pro (they are still promising an update on that, but given the last update took them something like 8 years, don't hold your breath), but it's certainly much closer to the Pro than Mac Mini.

 

[LazyGamer]

See, I'd take an updated Mac Mini with the older 'Pro' chipset, and only due to the increase in connectivity over the base M1. Just needs to have 10GbE and I'm good.

It'd probably get glued behind my current 38" IPS when someone comes out with a properly sized OLED replacement...

 

[LazyGamer]

It isn't quite the new Pro (they are still promising an update on that, but given the last update took them something like 8 years, don't hold your breath), but it's certainly much closer to the Pro than Mac Mini.

Separately, it's hard to imagine what would warrant the label of 'Mac Pro'. I'd imagine that expanded connectivity would be a big part of it, like having PCIe and NVMe slots, and perhaps integrating say QSFP-grade cages for 25Gbit+ connectivity given that 10GbE would constrain even first-gen NVMe (PCIe 3 based) drives.

But beyond connectivity I'm at a loss. Apple has already accelerated more or less everything that's 'hard' to do in terms of modern computing workloads outside of graphics-intensive gaming.