Right after the announcement of the 15-inch MacBook Air M2, Apple broke its silence on the successor to the M1 Ultra and launched the successor to it, the M2 Ultra. As you’d expect, the new chipset is based on a 2nd generation 5nm process and is the fruit company’s most powerful chipset in its portfolio.
Specs-wise, the M2 Ultra consists of 134 billion transistors, which is 20 billion more than its predecessor, the M1 Ultra. Its unified memory architecture supports up to 192GB of memory capacity, which again is 50% more than M1 Ultra, and comes with an 800GB/s memory bandwidth, more than twice that of M2 Max.
The M2 Ultra also features a more powerful CPU that Apple claims is 20% percent faster than M1 Ultra, a larger GPU that’s up to 30% faster, and a Neural Engine that’s up to 40% faster. In addition, It also features a media engine with twice the capabilities of M2 Max for blazing ProRes acceleration.
Beneath the hood, the M2 Ultra houses a 24-core CPU, comprising 16 next generation high-performance cores and eight high-efficiency cores. As for the GPU element, that alone can be configured with up to 76 next-generation cores, which is 12 more than the M1 Ultra. On paper, Apple says that this allows the new powerhouse chip to be up to three times faster than in predecessors, especially when used in the context of video processing. Oh, and it also features a 32-cores Neural engine, which is approximately
“M2 Ultra delivers astonishing performance and capabilities for our pro users’ most demanding workflows, while maintaining Apple silicon’s industry-leading power efficiency,” Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies says. “With huge performance gains in the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, combined with massive memory bandwidth in a single SoC, M2 Ultra is the world’s most powerful chip ever created for a personal computer.”
Like the M1 Ultra, the M2 Ultra comprise two M2 Max dies, connected and fused together through Apple’s UltraFusion packaging technology. Specifically, the technology interconnects the two powerhouse dies with more than 10,000 signals and provides more than 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth. Lastly, the chipset can be configured with up to 192GB of Unified Memory,
The Apple M2 Ultra SoC will be first made available through the the fruit company’s Mac Studio and Mac Pro desktop systems.
