As Apple concludes their latest event, we perhaps know why they called it ‘Peek Performance’ now. They’ve introduced a new absurdly powerful member of the Apple Silicon family, as well as the new Mac Studio desktop housing it along with the Studio Display monitor too.
The Apple M1 Ultra is the latest chip in the now nearly two-year-old M1 family of silicon, and is Apple pushing the absolute limits of what they can do with their M1 architecture. How do you do better than the already so powerful Apple M1 Max from last year? Well, simply put two of them together.
Similar to the multi-chip layout of Zen cores on AMD’s Ryzen processors, the M1 Ultra is essentially two M1 Max processors fused together. To ensure as little latency as possible between the chips, Apple has developed UltraFusion, their custom built packaging architecture. It uses a silicon interposer to connect the chip across over 10,000 signals, and says it can achieve over four times the bandwidth of rival multi-chip interconnect solutions.
It packs 20 CPU cores split between 16 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, with a total of 114 billion transistors on board. The GPU meanwhile has up to 64 GPU cores—the original M1 had 8—with a 32-core Neural Engine included as well. Together with up to 128GB of RAM with a memory bandwidth of 800GB/s, Apple claims that it’ll be able to deliver 90% higher multi-threaded performance compared to a rival 16-core PC desktop chip—within the same power restraints that is. Cupertino places a lot of importance on performance-per-watt of course, and Apple says that compared to a rival PC with an Intel Core i9-12900KF and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, it’ll consume up to 1,000kWh less power throughout the course of a year.
As for what will actually be using the Apple M1 Ultra, we didn’t have to wait too long to see them introduce the Mac Studio. It looks and pretty much is the M1 Mac Mini on steroids. Apple though won’t tell you that, instead saying that it is an entirely new Mac desktop. You can opt for either the Apple M1 Max chip or for even more performance, you can get one with the new M1 Ultra inside with up to 128GB of RAM and up to 8TB of storage available too. The M1 Ultra specifically provides some impressive, if a little vague, claims, such as up to 5.3 times the CPU performance of their older 27-inch iMac in certain applications, and up to 12.6 times the GPU performance of the iMac in Apple Compressor.
The likely reason why Apple has ditched the old Mac Mini housing for this new case for the Mac Studio is likely due to the need to cool Apple Silicon’s latest and greatest. Over half the space in the case has been taken up by two fans keeping the temperatures under control. It sucks cool air via a raised bottom and then vents it out back. And yet despite that, it’s still impressively small, measuring 9.5cm thick and 19.7cm wide. The case itself is made out of a single aluminum extrusion.
As for I/O, there’s four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10Gb Ethernet port, two USB-A ports, a HDMI port and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the rear of the Mac Studio. In front meanwhile, there’s a full size SD card slot and two USB-C ports, which gets upgraded to two Thunderbolt 4 ports if you’re using the M1 Ultra version. You can simultaneously connect up to five displays to it, with four Pro Display XDRs at 6K resolution reach and another 4K display hooked up to it. There’s a built-in speaker on the Mac Studio as well. It comes with WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity too.
There’s no point having the most powerful desktop Apple has ever made without a matching monitor to go along with it right? Well, at least Cupertino seems to think so, and have also launched a new monitor, the Apple Studio Display.
It’s a 27-inch, Retina display clocking in at a 5120 x 2880p resolution for a 5K screen, with a pixel density of 218ppi. It covers the P3 colour gamut of course, and has True Tone technology as well. It can provide up to 600nits of brightness and supports up to a billion colours too. Not only are you able to get it with just standard glass but you can add on the Pro Display XDR’s nano-textured glass as well to further minimize the glare off the glass. Housing those narrow bezels is an all-aluminum chassis, and its stand provides up to 30° of tilt. You can also configure it with a height adjustable stand option too, as well as a VESA mount adapter if you prefer to ditch the stands altogether.
On the top bezel sits a 12MP, f/2.4 ultra wide camera with a 122° field of view for all your video conferencing needs, and even features Center Stage too. There’s a six-speaker layout with woofers too that Apple says will support its Spatial Audio when playing content with Dolby Atmos, while a three-mic array is also present on the Studio Display. On the back of the monitor meanwhile is three downstream USB-C ports along with an upstream Thunderbolt 3 port with 96W host charging. To power all this this by the way, Apple has also put an A13 Bionic chip in it to run the camera and audio systems on the Studio Display.
So far, both are listed as currently unavailable for purchase on the Apple Malaysia website, but in the US both are already available for pre-order with availability from March 18 onwards. As for how much the Apple Mac Studio will cost:
You can opt to double the RAM onboard to 64GB for an extra RM1,600 for the M1 Max models, while the M1 Ultra models can double its memory to 128GB for an extra RM3,200. On top of that, for an additional RM800 you can get a 1TB SSD too, with up to 8TB of SSD storage available at an extra RM9,600.
Meanwhile, here’s how much the Apple Studio display will cost:
You can choose between a tilt-adjustable stand, a VESA mount adapter or a tilt- and height-adjustable stand for your Studio Display, but the option with the latter will cost you an additional RM1,600.
Intriguingly, Apple ended their reveal with a teaser for an upcoming Mac Pro, saying that their transition to Apple Silicon has been smoother than ever with just the Mac Pro left on non-Apple Silicon. However, all that was said is that that would be for another day.
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