Apple has introduced two new processors, the M5 Ultra and M6, which power the company’s latest Mac Mini and Mac Studio models. The M5 Ultra, described by Apple as its “most powerful chip ever,” combines two dual-die M5 Max chips into a quad-die configuration, designed to handle demanding AI workloads. It features up to a 36-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU, and 1.2 TB/s of unified memory bandwidth, representing a 50% increase over the M3 Ultra released approximately a year and a half ago.
In contrast, the M6 chip is positioned by Apple as more suitable for everyday users. Built on a cutting-edge 2 nm process, the M6 incorporates a new CPU complex, additional CPU and GPU cores, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and increased unified memory bandwidth, emphasizing energy efficiency. With a 12-core CPU complex, the M6 offers nearly a 30% increase in peak GPU compute for AI compared to the M5, enhancing the speed of prompt processing when utilizing on-device large language models (LLMs). Apple highlights that these new chips, combined with developer frameworks, enable running and fine-tuning large AI models locally on Mac devices, with automatic performance optimization across the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine. Source