Apple announces a new blazing-fast M1 Ultra chip for even better Macs

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M1 Ultra
M1 Ultra (Image credit: Apple)

What you need to know

  • Apple has announced a new M1 Ultra chip.
  • The M1 Ultra is built upon the existing M1 Max chip.
  • The new chip is set to be super-fast for the most intensive workflows.

Apple today announced a new chip to sit at the very top of its Apple silicon lineup. Here's M1 Ultra.

For those who don't find M1 Pro and M1 Max quick enough, the new Apple silicon builds on the latter and is dubbed M1 Ultra. In fact, Apple says that the whole new chip was made possible by an M1 Max 'hidden feature,' a die-to-die interconnect that allows two M1 Max chips to effectively be connected together. The result? A new chip with blazing performance.

The new chip features a total of 20 cores, 16 of which are high performance. In terms of GPU cores, a massive 60 are offered and 32 Neural Engine cores round out the specs. Apple says that we can expect twice the M1 Max media engine power as well as 22 trillion operations per second. This is one fast chip!

Users of the M1 Ultra can look forward to support for 128GB of unified memory as well as extremely high memory bandwidth.

The new M1 Ultra is undoubtedly the best Mac chip Apple has ever made. And you get the feeling that it's just getting started.

Developing

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.