Apple M1 Ultra SoC announced with 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, could be the most powerful PC chip yet

Apple announced a new M1 chip at its Peek Performance event. The new M1 Ultra chip is based on the same design as the M1 Max, it can be categorized as an M1 Max on steroids. The M1 Ultra is a desktop chip that has first been incorporated into Apple’s new Mac Studio desktop.

The M1 Ultra SoC uses Apple’s new UltraFusion that interconnects the die of two M1 Max chips to create a system on a chip (SoC). Apple says, “M1 Ultra delivers breathtaking computing power to the new Mac Studio while maintaining industry-leading performance per watt.”

The M1 Ultra chip consists of 114 billion transistors, which is the most ever in a PC chip. The chip can be configured with up to 128GB of high-bandwidth, low-latency unified memory. The chip features a 20-core CPU (16 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores), a 64-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine.

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Apple says that the M1 Ultra chip can transcode video to ProRes up to 5.6x faster than with a 28-core Mac Pro with Afterburner. Apple’s innovative UltraFusion uses a silicon interposer that connects the chips across more than 10,000 signals, providing a massive 2.5TB/s of low latency, inter-processor bandwidth — more than 4x the bandwidth of the leading multi-chip interconnect technology.

Additionally, the 64-core GPU is almost 8x the size of the GPU on the M1. Apple’s unified memory architecture has also scaled up with M1 Ultra. Memory bandwidth is increased to 800GB/s. The new Mac Studio with M1 Ultra can play back up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video.

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