Apple has unveiled the M6 and M5 Ultra, bringing two major additions to its Apple Silicon lineup with faster CPU and GPU performance, stronger AI processing, and higher memory bandwidth. The M6 debuts in the new Mac mini as Apple’s first chip built on a 2-nanometer process, while the M5 Ultra arrives in the refreshed Mac Studio as the company’s most powerful chip to date.
The M6 uses a new 12-core CPU with two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores, giving Apple two additional CPU cores compared with the M5. Apple says the chip delivers the “world’s fastest single-threaded performance,” alongside up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance than the M5 and up to 2.4x the performance of the M1.
Apple has also expanded the GPU to 12 cores and placed a Neural Accelerator inside every GPU core, resulting in nearly 30% higher peak GPU compute for AI than the M5. The chip supports up to 32GB of unified memory and 170GB/s of memory bandwidth, while native FP8 hardware processing should also improve performance and memory efficiency for AI workloads.
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M5 Ultra pushes Mac Studio performance higher
At the higher end, the M5 Ultra introduces Apple’s first quad-die chip architecture through a new version of UltraFusion, which connects two dual-die M5 Max chips. The design provides more than 4.4TB/s of inter-die bandwidth, while the chip itself offers up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, 512GB of unified memory, and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth.
Apple says the M5 Ultra delivers up to 1.25x faster single-threaded CPU performance and 1.3x faster multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra. GPU performance increases by up to 40%, while peak GPU compute for AI reaches up to 4.5x the level of the M3 Ultra.
Sri Santhanam, Apple’s vice president of Silicon Engineering Group, described the new chips as a major step for Apple Silicon:
“Today, we’re debuting the next giant leap in performance and AI compute for Apple silicon with the incredibly advanced M6 and the most powerful M-series chip yet, M5 Ultra. Built using the cutting-edge 2 nm process, M6 combines a new CPU complex, two additional CPU and GPU cores, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and more unified memory bandwidth to power through workloads with amazing energy efficiency.”
The M6 is available in the new Mac mini, while Apple is offering the M5 Ultra with the refreshed Mac Studio.
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