Apple Debuts M6 and M5 Ultra Chips for Pro Workflows

Yesterday, Apple officially unveiled its new flagship M6 and M5 Ultra processors, aimed at professional users. These chips are designed for the most resource-intensive tasks, including 3D rendering, artificial intelligence workloads, and professional video editing.

What Is the Apple M6 Chip?

The M6 is built on a cutting-edge 2nm process, allowing for an increased transistor count while improving energy efficiency. The new 12-core CPU includes 2 “super cores,” 4 performance cores, and 6 efficiency cores. According to Apple, the processor delivers the world’s fastest single-threaded performance, outperforming the M5 chip by 20% in multi-threaded tasks and the M1 chip by 2.4 times.

M6 GPU and AI Capabilities

The M6 graphics processor features 12 cores, each equipped with a neural accelerator. In Apple’s tests, the M6 shows a 30% performance increase in AI computations and an eightfold advantage over the M1. The graphics engine supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing and Dynamic Caching technology.

M6 Key Features

An upgraded neural engine with two 16-core blocks provides double the performance for AI tasks. The chip supports up to 32GB of unified memory with a bandwidth of up to 170GB/s and is already featured in the new Mac mini.

Meet Apple M5 Ultra: The Company’s Most Powerful Processor

The M5 Ultra is created using UltraFusion technology, combining two M5 Max dies into a single system. This is Apple’s first device with a four-die (quad-die) architecture, making it the most powerful solution in the current lineup.

M5 Ultra Performance and Specs

The chip is equipped with 36 CPU cores (12 “super cores” and 24 performance cores). Performance gains relative to the M3 Ultra are 1.25x for single-threaded and 1.3x for multi-threaded workloads. The GPU can be expanded to 80 cores, and the neural engine to 32 cores, which is 4.3 times faster than the M3 Ultra’s equivalent.

Professional Video Capabilities

The M5 Ultra has doubled the number of video encode and decode engines, allowing the chip to simultaneously process up to 33 streams of 8K ProRes video at 30 frames per second. The processor supports up to 512GB of unified memory with data transfer speeds up to 1.2TB/s. The chip is already available in the new Mac Studio.