Apple has revealed the latest update to its Apple Silicon chip during its "Peek Performance" March event. M1 Ultra is not only the strongest processor in its family, but the most powerful one Apple has ever made. This isn't too shocking, considering the M1 Ultra is comprised of two M1 Max chips stuck together, making for an excellent desktop-level chip.
Here's everything we know about M1 Ultra so far, including details on its release date and specs.
Apple M1 Ultra release date
Apple's M1 Ultra is launching for the first time alongside Mac Studio, set to launch on March 18. This is the latest evolution of the Mac Mini, with the cheapest iteration of Mac Studio being sold for $1,999 with the M1 Max. But the M1 Ultra will only be available with the $3,999 model.
Apple M1 Ultra specs
Apple is calling its latest technology "UltraFusion" architecture, which essentially just means the company has merged two M1 Max chips together. The M1 Ultra features 20 CPU cores, 64 GPU cores and 128GB of RAM.
It also boasts 114 billion transistors, 800GBs of memory bandwith and 2.5TB interprocessor bandwith. It can execute 22 operations per second thanks to the 32 core-Neural engine and promises industry-leading performance per watt.
Apple M1 Ultra outlook
We were surprised to see the next iteration of Apple Silicon involved the merging of two M1 Max chips. This marks quite the powerful addition to the M1 family, and although we were looking forward to the announcement of Apple's M2 chip at Apple's latest event, the power promised by the Ultra is admittedly fascinating.
Apple's "UltraFusion" feature means the Ultra can act as if its own full chip, even though it's actually just two M1 Max processors put into one. We look forward to seeing how the M1 Ultra does during testing.
