The rumor announced it, and Apple confirmed it: the Mac Studio M2 Ultra has been formalized. The in-house SoC designed in collaboration with TSMC is the most powerful chip ever designed by the Cupertino company. Only two overpowered computers will be equipped with it: the Mac Studio M2 Ultra therefore, but also the long-awaited Mac Pro, which has an impressive technical sheet.
Apple keynote time has arrived, and company representatives have not beaten around the bush. They immediately presented the new material from the companyamong which there is an attractive 15-inch MacBook Air, but above all desktop computers for very demanding users and professionals: the Mac Studio M2 Max, M2 Ultra and the Mac Pro only offered in the most powerful of engines. , necessarily.
Let’s first look at the case of the Mac Studio. If its external appearance does not seem to have changed one iota, its entrails are indeed different. The apple brand now offers two new versions of its in-house chip: the Max and Ultra versions, bringing the number of references in this series to four. The Ultra version is obviously the one that arouses the most curiosity as, in Apple’s own words, it is a “monstrous chip”, the most powerful ever offered by the firm to date. Its specs are impressive, to say the least, just take a look.
A Mac Studio M2 Max half as endowed, but very powerful all the same
The M2 Ultra chip is engraved in 5 nm and contains 134 billion transistors. Its Neural Engine chip includes 32 cores capable of processing 31.6 billion operations per second, the central processor contains up to 24 cores while the GPU can count up to 76 cores. In terms of RAM, the M2 Ultra chip can support up to 192 GB of unified RAM for a 800 GB/s bandwidth. The announced performance gain ranges from 20% for the processor, to 30% for the graphics part and up to an additional 40% for the processor responsible for the IA part of the Macs, the Neural Engine. Better still, compared to the yet very powerful M1 Ultra chip, the performance gain would be around 30%.
THE Mac Studio M2 Max will be powered by a 12-core CPU, and a GPU with up to 38 cores. RAM will be limited to 96 GB with a bandwidth of 400 GB/s. As we can see, even with half the equipment, the Mac Studio M2 Max still looks like a thunderbolt. These data sheets will in any case allow the lucky owner of one of these racing beasts to enjoy a processing speed 4 times faster than the fastest iMac for the M2 Max version, and 6 times faster for the M2 Ultra. The price of Mac Studio will start at $1999 in its M2 Max version.
The Mac Pro is back, and it has never deserved its name more
It was thought that Apple had shelved its computer for “real professionals”, the Mac Pro. Its last generation dates from 2019, a time when Intel still had Apple’s favor when it came to providing the most powerful processors. This year, it will be the M2 Ultra chip that will power Apple’s most powerful computer. Here again, no change is visible at the aesthetic level, but under the hood… it’s something else entirely. We already know the specifics of the M2 Ultra processor, but where the Mac Pro stands out is in terms of its connectivity: 8 Thunderbolt ports, 6 PCI slots. Just like the Mac Studio, the Mac Pro can be used with 6 Pro Display monitors in 8 K. It supports Wi-Fi 6E connectivity and Bluetooth 5.3. It also sports 3 USB-A ports, a 10 Gbit Ethernet port as well as a headphone jack.
This beautiful computer will unfortunately not be accessible to ordinary mortals, since the Cupertino company announces that the Mac Pro will be priced starting at $6,999.