Apple unveiled the M6 and M5 Ultra – the first 2-nm chip and the company’s most powerful processor.

Apple simultaneously unveiled two new processors for Mac. The base M6 became the first Apple chip manufactured using a 2-nm process, while the flagship M5 Ultra features up to 80 graphics cores, 512 GB of unified memory, and for the first time in the Apple Silicon family, combines four dies into a single processor.

Apple M6

M6 opens a new generation of Apple Silicon and is the first to transition to the 2-nm manufacturing process. Higher transistor density should simultaneously improve performance and energy efficiency, although Apple has not yet disclosed the number of transistors.

The processor received a 12-core CPU instead of the 10-core in M5. Its structure is unusual for previous Apple base chips: 2 super-cores, 4 performance cores, and 6 energy-efficient cores. In single-threaded tasks, Apple calls the new cores the fastest among processors, while multi-threaded performance has increased by 20% compared to M5 and by 2.4 times compared to M1.

The graphics processor has also increased from 10 to 12 cores. Each GPU core now has a dedicated Neural Accelerator. Peak performance GPU in artificial intelligence tasks has increased by nearly 30% compared to M5 and more than eight times compared to M1.

The graphics architecture has also been updated. M6 supports hardware ray tracing, Dynamic Caching, upgraded shader cores, and geometry processing speed has increased by 50%.

Apple paid special attention to the neural engine. Instead of a single Neural Engine, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine system is used, which actually consists of two 16-core blocks. System frameworks can utilize them simultaneously, and peak performance has increased up to two times relative to the previous generation.

M6 supports up to 32 GB of combined memory. Its bandwidth reaches 170 GB/s, which is approximately 10% more than the M5 and 2.5 times more than the M1.

The new Mac mini processor delivers up to 4.8x faster local LLM request processing in LM Studio compared to M4, accelerates Excel calculations by up to 1.5x, and approximately doubles gaming performance with ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition.

Apple M5 Ultra

If the M6 represents a new generation of Apple’s mass-market processors, then the M5 Ultra occupies the opposite position in the lineup. This is the most powerful Apple Silicon processor to date and the first M-series chip with four compute dies.

The M5 Ultra is built from two M5 Max chips, each of which already features a dual-die architecture. The new version of UltraFusion combines four dies so that the system perceives them as a single processor. The bandwidth of the connection between chips exceeds 4.4 TБ/s, and the interconnect density has increased more than sixfold.

CPU features up to 36 cores, including 12 super-cores and 24 performance cores. Single-threaded performance increased by 25%, and multi-threaded by 30% compared to the M3 Ultra.

GPU received up to 80 cores. For the first time, a Neural Accelerator is built into each graphics core for the Ultra processor. Peak computational power GPU in AI tasks has increased by up to 4.5 times compared to M3 Ultra and more than six times compared to M1 Ultra.

The graphics subsystem supports second-generation Dynamic Caching, hardware mesh shading, and third-generation ray tracing. Performance of GPU increased by up to 40% compared to M3 Ultra.

The M5 Ultra also received a 32-core Neural Engine and a significantly enhanced Media Engine. It includes hardware blocks for H.264, HEVC, and AV1, as well as four ProRes encoding and decoding engines. The new Mac Studio can simultaneously play up to 33 ProRes 422 streams at 8K resolution and 30 frames per second.

One of the main advantages of the M5 Ultra is its memory. The chip supports up to 512 GB of unified memory with a bandwidth of 1.2 TБ/s, which is 50% more than the M3 Ultra. This volume allows running large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters locally without transferring their data to the memory of a discrete accelerator or the cloud.

In real-world applications, Apple achieved up to fourfold acceleration of request processing LLM in LM Studio compared to M3 Ultra, up to 4.3 times faster image generation and up to 3.3 times faster ML model training in Foundry Nuke. In Maxon Redshift, rendering has accelerated by up to 1.7 times.

Comparison of specifications

New Macs and the start of sales

M6 debuted in the refreshed Mac mini. The base version comes with 16 GB of unified memory and starts at $899. In addition to the M6, the computer is available with the M5 Pro, which features up to 18 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores and starts at $1699.

Mac Studio is now available with M5 Max or M5 Ultra. The version with M5 Max starts at $2499, and the model with M5 Ultra starts at $5499.

Both computers are now available for pre-order. Sales of the Mac mini and Mac Studio will begin on September 22. The Mac Studio configuration with maximum 512 GB of unified memory will be available later, at the end of October.