Apple held the first conference of the year in the early morning of March 9, bringing users the strongest self-developed PC chip in history: M1 Ultra. The author understands that the M1 Ultra is designed with a multi-grain architecture, consisting of two M1 Max chips, with a 20-core CPU and a 64-core GPU.
M1 Ultra integrates a total of 114 billion transistors, configurable bandwidth up to 128GB and low-latency unified memory, under the call of 20-core CPU, 64-core graphics processor and 32-core neural network engine, M1 Ultra can greatly improve production efficiency, help developers compile code, artists render large-scale 3D scenes, and video production professionals transcode videos to ProRes format at the speed. This is up to 5.6 times higher than the 28-core Mac Pro with the Afterburner Accelerator Card.
The M1 Ultra uses Apple's custom Ultra Fusion package architecture to connect the dies of two M1 Max chips using a silicon intermediation layer to transmit more than 10,000 signals simultaneously, enabling up to 2.5TB/s low-latency processor interconnect bandwidth. This architecture allows the M1 Ultra to still show the integrity of a chip when working, and it will also be recognized by all software as a complete chip, and developers can directly use the power of the chip without rewriting the code.
M1 Ultra uses a 20-core CPU, consisting of 16 high-performance cores and 4 energy-efficient cores, Apple claims that the M1 Ultra against the high-end 16-core desktop processor, in the same performance of the power consumption, and the same power consumption, M1 Ultra performance 90% stronger. In the GPU part, Apple claims that the M1 Ultra consumes 200W less power at the same performance when playing against the highest-end GPU, and only 1/3 of the power consumption against the mainstream independent GPU.
Apple's unified memory architecture has also been upgraded in the M1 Ultra, the memory bandwidth has been increased to 800GB/s, and the maximum choice of unified memory is 128GB, which can support the processing of extreme 3D geometry, rendering huge scenes and other work requirements involving massive graphics.
The M1 Ultra's internal 32-core neural network engine can perform up to 22 trillion operations per second, accelerating the most complex machine learning tasks, and the built-in media processing engine is twice as powerful as the M1 Max. The new Mac Studio system with the M1 Ultra chip can play up to 18 simultaneous video streams in 8K ProRes422 format.
The M1 Ultra integrates a variety of custom technologies, such as a display engine capable of driving multiple external displays simultaneously, Raiden 4 controller integration, and security technologies, including Apple's latest security compartments, secure boot based on certified hardware, and runtime anti-exploit technologies.
The deep integration of hardware and software has always been Apple's strength, macOS Monterey is designed for Apple chips, able to take full advantage of the M1 Ultra's huge upgrades in CPU, graphics processor, memory bandwidth.
Developer technologies such as Metal can help apps take full advantage of the power of the new chip, while Optimizations for CoreML allow the new 32-core neural network engine to run machine learning models with unprecedented performance.
At present, Apple has fully applied the self-developed M1 series chips in almost all Mac product lines. The author learned that just after the conference, Apple quickly removed the 27-inch iMac on the official website, and this is also the last iMac product used by Apple × 86 architecture. The Mac Studio equipped with M1 Ultra chip starts at 14999 yuan, and small partners with needs can go to book.