Apple could seize the crown of the world's fastest GPU
Image source: Apple
Apple's M1 Pro and M1 Max chips were GPU-style warnings for Nvidia and AMD last year, and now Apple has boosted the heat with its new M1 Ultra. Apple claims it will rival Nvidia's giant RTX 3090 graphics card, which is currently the fastest GPU on the market. But how does Apple think it beat the RTX 3090? As it turns out, last year's M1 Max had some secret sauces inside.
Apple's new M1 Ultra is an amazing combination of two M1 Max chips that come together to form a powerful chip. The M1 Max has a secret high-speed interface that allows Apple to combine two chips into one. The result is that the M1 Ultra chip has double the CPU core, double the memory, double the memory bandwidth, and most importantly, double the GPU core.
Apple calls this combination UltraFusion, and it's actually Apple's own 2.5D chip package implementation. For years, the chip industry has been turning to small chips to design processors, with AMD's Zen 2 and Zen 3-based Ryzen chips leading the way in modern chip design and performance. Apple rivals such as Intel, Samsung and Qualcomm are in the early stages of collaborating on a new standard that would allow companies to make processors out of lego-like chiplets. Apple is leading the way in chips that fuse two separate GPUs together.
Apple's M1 lineup. Image source: Apple
Nvidia and AMD have built similar solutions for combining two GPUs in the past, but as AnandTech points out, it looks like Apple has tackled the holy grail of multi-GPU design. Apple's UltraFusion technology supports an impressive 2.5TB/s bandwidth between the two M1 Max chips. This is a huge bandwidth hop compared to NVLink for SLI or AMD with Infinity Fabric offered by Nvidia, which is used as a high-speed link between GPUs.
Apple's high-speed link means that two separate M1 Max GPUs will appear as a single GPU in macOS, making it easy for apps to take advantage of the combined features. This should mean that apps and games don't have to do anything special to take advantage of the power of the M1 Ultra, whereas games used to have to natively support Nvidia's SLI implementation on Windows to see any performance improvements.
Nvidia has all but killed multi-GPU support with its RTX 30 series, with only the RTX 3090 offering NVLink support. However, combining two RTX 3090s together to increase productivity or gaming rigs has very different results. Games that natively support SLI will offer performance advantages, while most games won't offer any improvements, and some will even see performance degradation.
Apple claims that its M1 Ultra can beat the RTX 3090 in some missions.
The Apple RTX 3090 is the fastest GPU on the market right now — until Nvidia finally delivers its delayed RTX 3090 Ti — apple claims the M1 Ultra can beat a single RTX 3090 while using 200 watts of power.
Apple made a similar statement last year that its M1 Max beat the RTX 3080, but the actual results were mixed. For productivity-focused loads, the M1 Max performs very well compared to the RTX 3080. Some reviewers have found that the M1 Max is slightly slower than the Adobe Premiere Pro mission's RTX 3080 system, but its relative performance really depends on the task at hand.
Apple has squeezed its M1 Ultra into its new Mac Studio, a desktop computer that's not much bigger than Nvidia's RTX 3090 in terms of size. The Mac Studio is very powerful, thanks to the M1 Ultra, which Apple designed to replace the 27-inch iMac and even mac Pro models.
Apple focuses on productivity apps — not games — with its M1 Ultra and Mac Studio. Both the M1 Max and M1 Pro were affected in game reviews, and performed similarly to the RTX 3060 in many games. M1 Ultra won't magically solve the shortcomings of macOS games, or most cross-platform games will still be x86.
The Mac Studio is a showcase of the M1 Ultra. Image source: Apple
We'll have to wait for reviews to see how much the GPU core has affected the performance of productivity apps, but Apple's already impressive start with the M1 Pro and M1 Max seems to be surpassing the M1 Ultra. Qualcomm and Microsoft have spent years delivering laptop-like performance on ARM-based Windows chips, while Apple has already delivered workstation-class performance here.
Apple's existing Mac Pro is powered by Intel Xeon CPUs and AMD's Radeon PRO W6000XGPUs. Apple ended its campaign yesterday, laughing at the Apple Silicon version of its Mac Pro machine "another day." Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman revealed last year that the Mac Pro will come with up to 40 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores. If you keep counting, that's twice as much as the M1 Ultra.
The M1 Ultra in Mac Studio will give us an early look at the number of Cores and the extent to which GPU performance can scale to high-end systems. Here's a preview of what's coming when Apple offers the Mac Pro, which includes the best features its Apple Silicon can offer.