Finally, the Cupertino giant has announced the last chip of its incredible M1 lineup which has expanded to its limits to create the biggest chip possible – the M1 Ultra. The new chip shows Apple’s dedication to speaking for itself and making the best ARM-based SoC possible to take on with AMD or Intel’s best chips available in the market.
The new M1 Ultra is built on the same foundation as the M1 Pro or M1 Max, it borrows similarity with the M1 Max as it uses UltraFusion technology to bind two M1 Max’s together. Simply this is a strategy that AMD has already been using with interconnecting multi-chip silicon dies but Apple is claiming the bandwidth to be much higher than the industries.
Apple is claiming as much as 2.5TB/s interprocessor bandwidth and a massive 114 billion transistors to make the biggest chip possible by the Cupertino giant. The SoC will be using a 128GB unified memory and feature up to 20 cores, where 16 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores.
The 16-core performance cores will be using a total of 48MB L2 cache while those 4 efficiency cores will use 8MB L2 cache. Coming to the GPU front, the M1 Ultra will feature a monstrous 64 core GPU which will have 8192 execution units, delivering up to 21 teraflops of horsepower and Apple claims the GPU is 8 times faster than the M1’s GPU.
Now, having 2 M1 Max together means everything gets doubled, so, you have a 32 core Neural engine now that could do 22 trillion operations per second. Then you have 2 video decode engines and 4 video encode engines, as well as, 4 ProRes encode/decode engines as well, so productivity tasks will never be a problem with M1 Ultra.
Coming to the incredible performance claim Apple has stated, the Cupertino giant has compared its latest chip with Intel’s latest 12th Gen SKUs. It made a comparison of the M1 Ultra against 16-core Core i9-12900K and says to deliver 90% greater performance per watt as the M1 Ultra could give better results drawing only 60W of power while Intel, as we know, is a lot more power-hungry.
The M1 Ultra could use 100W lesser power to give a similar performance as that of the Core i9-12900K. Now, coming to the GPU front, which is also present in the same SoC, the new M1 Ultra chip’s GPU is said to be using 200W lesser power than a full-fledged RTX 3090 to give better performance, which is a massive claim for Apple and achievement as well.
Overall, the new Apple M1 Ultra chip defies what the Cupertino giant is able to do with its own engineers and deliver incredible performance without sacrificing efficiency. The new UltraFusion architecture allows easily to merge two M1 Max SoCs together, retaining every cool feature it had and making a new monster that the industry can take the example of.
The first device to feature this monstrous SoC is the new Mac Studio, if you have the money to spend, M1 Ultra is a wonder Apple has created you could spend for, setting new standards for the industry.
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