Apple unveils new ‘monster’ M1 Ultra chip

Apple announced its latest chip during its ‘Peek Performance’ event on March 8th: the M1 Ultra chip.

In short, the new chipset uses Apple’s ‘UltraFusion’ architecture to connect two M1 Max chips to boost performance. Apple claims UltraFusion offers four times more bandwidth than other leading chip interconnect technologies.

The M1 Ultra appears as one chip to software despite effectively being two separate chips.

M1 Ultra also supports up to 128GB of RAM, has a 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance and four high-efficiency cores, plus a 64-core GPU. Apple says M1 Ultra is nearly eight times faster than Apple’s M1 chip.

Moreover, Apple claims that M1 Ultra delivers higher performance than leading 16-core PC desktop chips while using significantly less power. The company claims Ultra used 1/3rd the power of the leader “popular discrete GPU,” although Apple didn’t specify what that GPU was.

Apple also boasted about the tight integration between its M1 silicon and macOS, which brings performance and security benefits.

More to come…