Apple has announced new Mac Studio models based on the familiar M5 Max processor and the new M5 Ultra, which the company says is its most powerful chip yet. The new product uses the same compact body, and its design has remained almost unchanged since the launch of Mac Studio in 2022. The M5 Max starts at $2,499 and the M5 Ultra starts at $5,499.
Image source: Apple
The base Mac Studio with the M5 Max chip comes with 36GB of unified memory and 512GB of storage. The entry-level configuration of the M5 Ultra-based Mac Studio comes with 96GB of memory and a 1TB SSD. Apple began taking pre-orders on August 25, and the new computer will be available on September 22 along with the new Mac Mini. The top-tier M5 Ultra configuration, with an impressive 512 GB of unified memory, won’t be available until the end of October.
In a press release, Apple called the new Mac Studio “a landmark step in artificial intelligence.” The peak AI computing performance of Mac Studio equipped with M5 Ultra is 4.3 times faster than that of M3 Ultra. In addition, Apple also promises to increase graphics performance by up to 1.8 times and multi-thread CPU performance by up to 1.3 times.
M5 Ultra is the first four-chip Apple Silicon processor. It combines two M5 Max, each of which is composed of two crystals. The connection capacity between them exceeds 4.4 TB/s. The M5 Ultra comes with a CPU with up to 36 cores, including 12 Super Cores and 24 Performance Cores, and a GPU with up to 80 cores. Each graphics core has a separate neural accelerator built into it.
Mac Studio with M5 Max offers an 18-core CPU and up to 40 GPU cores, as well as up to 128 GB of unified memory. Its throughput reaches 614 GB/s. Taking M5 Ultra as an example, the unified memory capacity can reach 512 GB, and the bandwidth has also increased from 819 GB/s of M3 Ultra to 1.2 TB/s.
The new Mac Studio also features a hard drive that’s twice as powerful as its predecessor. Apple has switched to a new SSD architecture using the PCIe 6.0 interface. The computer supports up to eight monitors simultaneously or up to four Studio Display XDR with 5K resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate. In addition, the emergence of Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 also benefits from Apple’s proprietary N1 wireless chip. Six Thunderbolt 5 ports are also retained, now allowing you to combine multiple Mac Studio into a cluster for distributed AI computing.
In addition, Apple also provides the function of combining multiple Mac Studio into a computing cluster to process AI. The computers are connected via Thunderbolt 5 using RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) technology, which allows the systems to directly access each other’s memory and essentially form a shared memory pool for running particularly large AI models. According to Apple, a cluster of four Mac Studio can deliver inference speeds three times faster than a single system. Given that a Mac Studio with M5 Ultra can be equipped with 512 GB of unified memory, this opportunity is mainly aimed at local launch of the largest model with open scale.
The new Mac Studio will run macOS 27 Golden Gate and has updated Apple Intelligence and Siri AI. macOS 27 itself is still in public beta and will be released as a free update this fall.
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