Apple unveils M6 and M5 Ultra chips to boost Mac performance and AI capabilities
The new processors mark a shift to 2-nanometre manufacturing and a quad-die architecture, targeting professional workloads and on-device artificial intelligence.
Apple has introduced the M6 and M5 Ultra system-on-chip processors, debuting them in the new Mac mini and Mac Studio respectively. The announcement, detailed in a statement from the company, highlights a significant architectural shift in its silicon roadmap, with the M6 becoming Apple’s first chip manufactured on a 2-nanometre process.
The M6 chip features a 12-core CPU, a 12-core GPU, and a Dual 16-core Neural Engine. It offers up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth and supports up to 32GB of unified memory. Apple claims the M6 provides up to 2.4x faster multithreaded performance than the M1 and 1.2x faster than the M5, positioning it for everyday users, developers, and enterprises seeking a balance of performance and power efficiency.
The M5 Ultra, launching in the Mac Studio, introduces the company’s first quad-die architecture. It utilises next-generation UltraFusion technology to connect two dual-die M5 Max chips, creating an inter-die bandwidth of over 4.4TB/s. This design allows the four dies to function as a single unified processor, delivering up to 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth and supporting up to 512GB of unified memory.
Apple describes the M5 Ultra as its most powerful chip to date, designed for professional workloads such as complex 3D rendering and running compute-intensive frontier AI models. The chip features an up-to-36-core CPU and an up-to-80-core GPU with Neural Accelerators. According to the company, the M5 Ultra offers up to 4.5x the peak GPU compute for AI compared to the M3 Ultra.
Sri Santhanam, Apple’s vice president of Silicon Engineering Group, stated that the M6 combines a new CPU complex and additional cores to power through workloads with energy efficiency. She added that the M5 Ultra features a massive GPU and increased memory bandwidth, pushing the boundaries of what a desktop can do for users running massive AI models.
The new M6 Mac mini starts at US$899 for the model with 16GB of unified memory, representing a US$200 price increase over the previous generation. Apple’s developer frameworks, including Core AI and Metal, are designed to tap directly into the advanced hardware of both chips, enabling developers to run and fine-tune large AI models locally on Mac devices.
