Apple just unveiled its latest Mac Studio desktop PC promising improved performance over the previous model thanks to the long awaited M3 Ultra, the company’s highest performing processor to date. The new machine is primarily aimed at content creators, so on top of the faster chips, it offers the latest high-speed SSD storage, Thunderbolt 5 technology and an updated Neural Engine.
It’s been a bit of a wait for a new Mac Studio as the last one came out at WWDC 2023, nearly two years ago. As before, you can think of it as like a “Mac mini Pro,” a bigger and significantly more powerful version of Apple’s budget desktop. Like the last two models, it comes in two configurations with either the M3 Ultra or M4 Max chips and physically looks the same as the previous M2 model.
The M4 Max version is aimed at “video editors, colorists, developers, engineers, photographers and creative pros,” according to Apple. To that end, it comes with up to a 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU, from 36GB to 128GB of RAM, four Thunderbolt 5 ports with 15 GB/s throughput (triple the previous model’s speed) and over 500 GB/s of unified memory bandwidth. It also includes Two USB-A ports (up to 5Gb/s), an HDMI port, 10Gb ethernet and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
All that makes it up to 3.5 times faster than the original Mac Studio M1 Max. Apple noted that with the M4 Max chip, the latest Mac Studio is the first with Apple’s advanced graphics architecture that allows features like hardware-accelerated mesh rendering and a second-generation ray-tracing engine to boost content creation and gaming. For AI processing, it offers triple the speed of the M1 Max version.
The M3 Ultra model ups the ante considerably with a 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores, “50 percent more than any previous Ultra chip and the most CPU cores ever in a Mac,” Apple said. Meanwhile, the GPU packs up to 80 cores, another record for Apple silicon, along with a 32-core Neural Engine for on-device AI and machine learning. It also supports from 96GB to a record 512GB of unified memory, plus up to 16TB of SSD storage.
You may be wondering why Apple is just now releasing the M3 Ultra chip when every other Mac (including the all-new MacBook Air) has some kind of M4 processor. The answer is that it’s apparently not easy to design and build the Ultra processors because they’re effectively two chips mated together using Apple’s “Ultrafusion” bridge technology. Despite not having “M4” in the name, though, the M3 Ultra is still approximately twice as fast as the best M4 Max processor under taxing workloads and 2.5 times quicker than the Mac Ultra M1.
Considering its power, the Mac Studio with an M4 Max chip is reasonably priced starting at $1,999 with 32GB of memory and 512GB of storage. The Mac Studio with M3 Ultra is another story, though, doubling that to $3,999 base, with 96GB of unified memory (up from 64GB before) and 1TB of storage. Orders are now open with shipping set to start on March 12th.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/apples-new-mac-studio-comes-with-the-long-awaited-m3-ultra-chip-140005216.html?src=rss
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