Apple's M1 Ultra is the world’s most powerful chip for a personal computer

Apple recently announced the new M1 Ultra chip, the next breakthrough chip for the Mac, at the Peak Performance Event, 2022. Building on M1 Max’s transformational architecture, M1 Ultra is claimed to be the world’s most powerful chip for a personal computer. 

Apple says that with M1 Ultra, it did “something truly groundbreaking.” The chip’s architecture interconnects the die of two M1 Max chips to create a system on a chip (SoC) with unprecedented levels of performance and capabilities, explained Johny Srouji, SVP, Hardware Technology at Apple. Apple calls this the "ultra-fusion architecture." The technology uses a silicon interposer that connects over 10,000 signals and provides 2.5TB/s of low latency, inter-processor bandwidth between the two dies while using very little power. Srouji asserts this to be more than 4x the bandwidth of the leading multi-chip interconnect technology. 

Ultra-fusion essentially treats two chips as one in software, with 114 billion transistors- 7x more than M1. “There’s never been anything like it,” the company says.

M1 Ultra’s memory bandwidth is increased to 800GB/s, more than 10x the latest PC desktop chip. Additionally, it can be configured with up to 128GB of high bandwidth with low-latency unified memory. The chip is powered by a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine, making its performance suitable for developers and artists in 3D environments. The company welcomed developers from Adobe, Vectorworks, Ableton and CLO who vouched for these capabilities.

Industry experts and Apple enthusiasts have taken to Twitter to express their opinions on the M1 Ultra.