North Wake News

Apple has unveiled its latest chip, the M3 Ultra, which the company describes as its most powerful creation to date. This new addition to Apple silicon features a CPU and GPU that surpass previous models in performance, boasting double the Neural Engine cores and unprecedented unified memory capacity in a personal computer. The M3 Ultra also introduces Thunderbolt 5 with over twice the bandwidth per port, enhancing connectivity and expansion capabilities.

The M3 Ultra is constructed using Apple's UltraFusion packaging architecture. This innovative design connects two M3 Max dies through more than 10,000 high-speed connections, enabling low latency and high bandwidth. This configuration allows the system to operate as if it were a single unified chip, providing substantial performance gains while maintaining energy efficiency. The UltraFusion architecture integrates a total of 184 billion transistors.

Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, stated: “M3 Ultra is the pinnacle of our scalable system-on-a-chip architecture, aimed specifically at users who run the most heavily threaded and bandwidth-intensive applications.” He highlighted its significant features including a 32-core CPU and Thunderbolt 5 connectivity.

The M3 Ultra offers up to a 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores and eight efficiency cores. It claims up to 1.5 times the performance of its predecessor, the M2 Ultra, and up to 1.8 times that of the M1 Ultra. Its GPU can have up to 80 graphics cores, providing speeds up to twice as fast as those in the M2 Ultra and up to 2.6 times faster than in the M1 Ultra.

Advanced graphics architecture supports dynamic caching along with hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing for demanding content creation workloads and gaming experiences. The Neural Engine comprises 32 cores designed for AI and machine learning tasks.

Apple emphasizes that this chip is built for AI applications with ML accelerators in its CPU, advanced GPU capabilities, a robust Neural Engine, and over 800GB/s memory bandwidth. The device's unified memory starts at 96GB but can be configured up to an impressive 512GB.

Thunderbolt 5 technology allows data transfer speeds reaching up to 120 Gb/s—more than double those offered by Thunderbolt 4—and supports multiple Mac Studio systems connected together for complex workflows.

The media engine within M3 Ultra is equipped for extensive video processing with dedicated H.264, HEVC encoding/decoding engines alongside four ProRes encode/decode engines capable of handling multiple streams of high-definition video simultaneously.

As part of Apple’s ongoing environmental efforts under their Apple 2030 initiative aiming for carbon neutrality across all operations by decade's end—the power-efficient design contributes towards reduced energy consumption over product lifespan while meeting stringent energy efficiency standards set by Apple themselves today already carbon neutral globally when considering corporate operations alone according officials from Cupertino headquarters where announcement made publically earlier week following months speculation among industry insiders regarding potential release dates latest generation chipset technology offerings anticipated long awaited eagerly awaited fanbase worldwide alike