At 2:00 a.m. Beijing time on March 9, Apple officially held the first press conference of 2022. Although the M2 self-developed chip that everyone is very much looking forward to has not come, Apple has released many new products. Especially for the PC product line, Apple not only released the more powerful M1 Ultra self-developed chip, but also launched the Mac Studio and Studio Display for creative productivity users. Although these new products are far from the mass consumer for the time being, I personally look forward to the future performance of the M1 Ultra after landing on the MacBook.
But now, we may wish to take a look at the M1 Ultra and Mac Studio, Studio Display three new products.
Finish the last piece of the puzzle of the M1 self-developed processor: M1 Ultra debuts
After the launch of the M1 Pro and M1 Max last year, Apple launched the king of the M1 series at the first conference this year, and it is also the last self-developed chip of the M1 series - M1 Ultra.
In simple terms, you can think of the M1 Ultra as a "double version" of the M1 Max. Because the M1 Ultra uses the die-to-die connector that has been hidden in the M1 Max until now, and integrates the two M1 Maxes together via the Ultra Fushion architecture. At the same time, Ultra Fushion solves the latency and power consumption problems between the two chips, with a bandwidth of 2.5TB/s.
In terms of specifications, the M1 Ultra is still built using a 5nm process, with 114 billion transistors, a unified memory capacity of up to 128GB, and a total bandwidth of 800GB/s.
At the same time, because the M1 Ultra is a double version of the M1 Max, its CPU cores reached 20 and the GPU cores reached 64. Among the 20 CPU cores, there are 16 performance cores and 4 energy efficiency cores, and the L2 cache totals 48MB+8MB. The GPU contains 8192 execution units, with a maximum of 196608 concurrent threads, 21TFlops, a texture fill rate of 660 billion per second, and a pixel pixel fill rate of 330 billion per second.
In addition, the M1 Ultra neural engine core has also been doubled to 32, and the computing power can reach 22 trillion times per second. Its media engine supports hardware acceleration H.264, H.265, ProRes, ProRes RAW, including 2 video decoding engines, 4 video encoding engines, and 4 ProRes codec engines.
In terms of specs, the M1 Ultra provides a solid performance foundation for the all-new Mac Studio.
Enthusiast-grade productivity tools: Mac Studio and Studio Display
Next, let's look at the highlight of Apple's PC product line - Mac Studio.
From the design point of view, Mac Studio can be said to be a "thickened version" of the Mac mini. Its body height is about 9.4cm, the width is about 19.6cm, and the entire fuselage is as small as possible, so its internal hardware can be said to be highly integrated. As can be seen from the perspective below, the Mac Studio motherboard area occupies a small space, and most of the space is occupied by the heat dissipation module.
The bottom of the Mac Studio fuselage is densely packed with circular air outlets, built-in dual fans, and the air outlet and the fan and the heat dissipation hole on the back of the fuselage form a closed-loop air duct, which can effectively reduce the core hardware heat.
As a product for productivity users, Mac Studio has a very strong connectivity, its back is equipped with 4 Thunderbolt 4 interfaces, the front end is also equipped with two Thunderbolt 4 interfaces, which is currently equipped with Thunderbolt 4 interfaces of the most PC devices. So it can expand multiple 4K/8K displays, and for that matter, the Mac Studio is a veritable audiophile productivity device.
In the case of the M1 Ultra, Mac Studio has been greatly improved compared to Apple's other productivity devices, such as Mac Pro and iMac, whether it is CPU performance or GPU performance. In addition, Apple also emphasized the environmental friendliness of Mac Studio, and its core hardware is made of materials such as 100% recycled rare earths and 100% recycled tin.
At present, Mac Studio has been listed on the official website, M1 Max, 32GB, 512GB version priced at 14999 yuan, M1 Ultra, 64GB, 1TB version priced at 29999 yuan, in addition to a variety of different configuration models to choose from. Pre-orders will begin at 9 a.m. on March 10 and will go on sale on March 18.
Launched in conjunction with Mac Studio, there is also a new Studio Display display, which uses a 27-inch 1.47-megapixel 5K Retina retina screen, supports 600nits brightness, P3 wide color gamut, and optional Nano-textured glass, which can effectively prevent glare. In addition, Mac Studio features a studio-grade microphone array with four vibration-canceling woofers to reduce distortion, while its speakers also support spatial audio.
Studio Display is also equipped with three 10Gb/s UBS-C interfaces, supporting 96W power transfer, charging devices such as MacBooks, and supporting various bracket schemes. At present, Studio Display has also been listed on the official website, the ordinary version starts at 11499 yuan, the Nano-textured glass version starts at 13499 yuan, and the pre-sale is also opened on March 10, and it is officially released on March 18.
Conclusion
Overall, both Mac Studio and Studio Display are limitedly attractive to the average consumer, on the one hand, because they are more expensive, and on the other hand, their own audience is not consumer-level users. For professional fields such as film and television post-production, photography and video, cultural and creative arts, and program development, Mac Studio is indeed a very efficient professional productivity tool, and its excellent performance and strong connectivity can bring more efficient performance to productivity applications.
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