Meet The Apple M6 and M5 Ultra

You Guessed It, There’s AI Involved

Apple have impressed everyone with the performance of their M-series of CPUs after dumping Intel for their own internal design in 2020.  They’ve pretty much been on a yearly cadence since then, apart from the M2 which they’d rather not talk about.  This year sees a new Apple M6 and an M5 Ultra too.  The M6 is a hefty piece of silicon with 12 cores that are split into two super cores, and consist of four performance cores, and six efficiency cores.  Also onboard is a 12 core GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core and a dual 16-core Neural Engine.    Apple paired this with 32GB of unified memory with 170GB/s of bandwidth, 10% more than the M5.  They claim a 1.2x improvement on multithreaded CPU performance and nearly 30% more peak GPU AI compute compared to the M5.

The M5 Ultra is even bigger, essentially two dual-die M5 Max chips combined in into a single quad-die SoC which communicate at 4.4TB/s over an inter-die fabric connection.  That adds up to a total of 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, a GPU with 80 cores and with Neural Accelerators, with a 32-core Neural Engine.  The unified memory can be as large as 512GB but runs at a mere 1.2TB/s.  That memory bandwidth is still 50% more than the M3 Ultra according to what ServeTheHome was told and 1.3x faster multithreaded performance.   Interestingly a full M5 Ultra system comes with a PCIe Gen6 SSD, the first we will see on a consumer product.

The two systems will cost around $10K and $11K respectively.