Apple announced its latest M-series chips today with the Apple M6 and M5 Ultra. Both are aimed at professional users who want the best macOS performance in more demanding tasks like AI modeling, 3D rendering and complex video editing.
Apple M6
The M6 is built on a 2nm process, which allowed Cupertino to fit more transistors on a smaller die while also improving power efficiency. It brings a 12-core CPU (2 more than the M5) featuring 2x super cores, 4x performance units and 6x efficiency cores. Apple revealed that the CPU offers the world’s fastest single-threaded performance. Apple M6 is up to 1.2x faster in multi-thread performance than the M5 chip and 2.4x faster than the Apple M1.
On the GPU side, M6 brings 12 cores, with each unit featuring a Neural Accelerator. According to Apple’s in-house testing, the M6 is 30% faster than the M5 in peak GPU compute AI tasks and 8x faster than the M1. The GPU also boasts hardware-based ray tracing and Dynamic Caching.
The M6 also brings an updated NPU with a dual 16-core neural engine that’s rated at 2x the peak compute over the M5 in on-device AI workflows. Apple M6 supports up to 32GB of unified memory at up to 170GB/s speeds. It is available in the newly announced Mac mini.
Apple M5 Ultra
Alongside the M6 chip, Apple also announced its M5 Ultra. It takes a similar approach to previous M-series Ultra chips by connecting two dual-die M5 Max chips via Apple’s UltraFusion interconnect technology. This makes the M5 Ultra the first M-series chip to use a quad-die architecture, and Apple claims it is its most powerful chip to date.
It is configurable with up to 36 CPU cores featuring 12x super cores and 24x performance cores. Apple claims the M5 Ultra is capable of 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra chip.
You can max out the GPU core count to 80 units and have up to 32 Neural Engine cores. Apple claims it is capable of 4.3x the peak AI compute compared to the M3 Ultra. The M5 Ultra also gets 2x more video encode and decode blocks, which allows the chip to handle up to 33 streams of 8K ProRes video at 30fps simultaneously.
M5 Ultra is configurable with up to 512GB of unified memory at up to 1.2TB/s speeds. It will make its debut on the just-announced Mac Studio.