Apple’s Best New Chipset Isn’t the M4 Max

Aside from the launch of the sky blue M4-powered MacBook Air, this week's flurry of Apple announcements saw the introduction of the most powerful Apple silicon desktop processor yet. Given Apple's numbering scheme for its own chipsets, you'd think that would be one with an M4 label attached, but it's actually the M3 Ultra, which will power the newest Mac Studio.

Since Apple started releasing its own chipsets with the M designation, we've seen a variety of different labels attached. First came the standard processor, then the Pro, then the Max, and then the Ultra, with performance improving with each iteration. We're now up to the M4 Max and the M3 Ultra.

When preordering directly from Apple, you can fit the latest Mac Studio with either the M4 Max or the M3 Ultra, but the latter's superior capabilities are evident in the pricing: The starting price of an M3 Ultra Mac Studio is double that of an M4 Max Mac Studio.

The M3 Ultra is available in the new Mac Studio. Credit: Apple

Here's what's going on: As with previous generation chipsets with the Ultra moniker, the M3 Ultra is essentially two M3 Max processors fused together and appearing as one, using a technique Apple calls UltraFusion. You're basically getting twice the performance: This piece of silicon features an incredible 184 billion transistors.

So many cores

Here are some more stats: The M3 Ultra offers up to 32 CPU cores (compared to 24 on its most comparable predecessor, the M2 Ultra. It sports up to 80 CPU cores (compared to 76 on the M2 Ultra), 32 neural cores (the same as the M2 Ultra), support for up to 512GB of memory (compared to 192GB on the M2 Ultra), and up to 819GB/s of memory bandwidth (compared to 800GB/s). Overall, performance is around 1.5x of the Apple M2 Ultra.

While the M2 Ultra chipset is the direct forebear to the M3 Ultra, if you're buying a Mac Studio, you'll be choosing between the M3 Ultra to the M4 Max—the latter being the processor that launched last year with the refreshed MacBook Pros. The M4 Max gives you up to 16 CPU cores, up to 40 GPU cores, 16 neural cores, support for up to 128GB of memory, and up to 546GB/s of memory bandwidth.

One of the benefits of the M3 Ultra supporting so much RAM—more than half a terabyte—is that users can run more powerful AI models locally, on their own machines. A Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra inside should have enough oomph to run something like DeepSeek R1 locally, without having to connect to servers in China.

Apple's two latest chipsets, compared. Credit: Apple

The M3 Ultra also comes with a Thunderbolt 5 upgrade, doubling the maximum data transfer rates from Thunderbolt 4, up to 120Gb/s. This means you can even link multiple Mac Studios together (if you've got the budget for them), while the display engine on the M3 Ultra is capable of driving more than 160 million pixels—the equivalent of eight Pro Display XDRs.

"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," says Johny Srouji, a senior vice president of hardware technologies at Apple.

And what of the M4 Ultra? Apple hasn't said anything about it yet, but intimated to Ars Technica that it might not add an Ultra model this time around. That would make the M4 series the first to go without an Ultra variant, but as these super-powerful, super-expensive chipsets are only of interest to those with the most demanding needs and the deepest pockets, less frequent launches may be the most logical course of action.

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