Apple Unveils Powerful M2 Ultra Chip and New Mac Models at WWDC23

Apple held the WWDC23 Developer Conference in the early hours of June 6th. During the event, Apple unveiled a series of new hardware products, including the Apple Vision Pro headset and the flagship M2 Ultra SoC chip, which is the most powerful Apple Silicon chip to date.

Based on the previously released M2 Max in early 2023, the M2 Ultra chip is built using the 5nm process technology and offers doubled performance. It features a 24-core CPU, a 60-core GPU, support for up to 192GB of unified memory, and an 800GB/s memory bandwidth. Additionally, there is another version of the M2 Ultra chip with an upgraded GPU to 76 cores.

Apple states that the M2 Ultra chip is designed around high-bandwidth unified memory and integrates a high-performance CPU and GPU. It effortlessly handles media processing tasks such as multiple 8K ProRes video streams with its media processing engine, a super-fast 32-core neural network engine, and the latest secure enclave functionality.

The M2 Ultra chip is composed of two M2 Max chips, making it the largest and most powerful SoC chip Apple has produced so far. Through the custom packaging architecture called UltraFusion, the two M2 Max chips are interconnected, providing a processor-to-processor bandwidth of up to 2.5TB/s with low latency and extremely low power consumption. Therefore, for software applications, the M2 Ultra chip functions as a single chip, enabling optimal utilization of its performance by various apps. The M2 Ultra chip with its 76-core GPU delivers graphics performance of 272 trillion floating-point operations per second, while the 32-core neural network engine achieves a processing speed of 316 trillion operations per second, significantly accelerating various machine learning tasks.

On the same day, Apple also announced the 2023 edition of the Mac Studio computer, which can be equipped with either the M2 Max or the new M2 Ultra chip.

In terms of connectivity, the new Mac Studio features four Thunderbolt 4 ports, DisplayPort, USB 4, USB 3.1 Gen2, a 10Gb Ethernet port, and an HDMI port, among others. The product is also equipped with an SDXC card slot, built-in Wi-Fi 6E wireless card, and a maximum sustained power of 370W.

Apple also released the all-new Mac Pro workstation, which is powered by the M2 Ultra chip and comes in both tower and rack-mounted versions. The base storage configuration includes 64GB of unified memory and a 1TB solid-state drive.

According to official statements, compared to the previous high-end Mac Pro with Intel processors, the new Mac Pro offers a 2.7x improvement in 3D rendering speed, 3x faster 8K rendering performance in Final Cut Pro, 3.8x faster ProRes transcoding performance, and a 3x improvement in filters and functionality in Photoshop. Currently, thousands of professional apps have been optimized for Apple chips. Additionally, the new Mac Pro comes with seven PCIe expansion slots, including six PCIe 4.0 slots for expanding storage devices and other peripherals.

In other aspects, the new Mac Pro features eight Thunderbolt 4 ports, supporting up to eight 4K 60Hz displays or three 8K 60Hz displays simultaneously. It also includes USB 4, USB 3.1 Gen2, DisplayPort, HDMI, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, two 10Gb Ethernet ports as standard, and has a maximum sustained power of 1280W.