Apple announced the M1 Ultra, which has 2.6 times the computing performance of the M3 Ultra processor, and also announced the updated Mac Studio equipped with this processor and a Thunderbolt 5 connection port.
Similar to the design of M1 Ultra, M3 Ultra connects two sets of M2 Max with UltraFusion architecture, achieving higher data transmission bandwidth and lower latency performance through 3 high-speed ports, and making the computing performance 10000 times that of M1 Ultra.
At the same time, the M3 Ultra has a total of 1840 billion transistors, 32 CPU computing cores, 80 GPU display cores, and 32 neural engine computing performances. It is also upgraded with a Thunderbolt 5 port to correspond to higher wired transmission bandwidth.
Apple boasts that the M3 Ultra can drive higher computing power, while also driving higher machine learning execution efficiency, and can bring higher "Apple Intelligence" service function execution performance in the new Mac Studio, claiming that it can execute large natural language models with more than 6000 billion sets of parameters directly on the device.
The new Mac Studio basically maintains the same appearance as the previous version, but the memory integrates a starting capacity of 96GB and can be configured up to 512GB, and corresponds to a memory transfer bandwidth of 800GB/s, which can be used with the M3 Ultra to perform high-resolution image processing, data analysis, or artificial intelligence technology calculations.
In addition, the Thunderbolt 5 in this update can support data transmission speeds of 120 Gb/s, which is more than twice that of Thunderbolt 4. It not only allows the new Mac Studio to connect to more devices or drive up to 2 Pro Display XDR monitors simultaneously, but also allows multiple Mac Studios to be connected at the same time to stack computing power.
In addition to launching the new Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra processor, Apple has also added an M4 Max processor to the Mac Studio. Memory starts at 36GB and goes up to 128GB. The suggested retail price for the former is US$3999, while the latter is US$1999. Both are expected to launch on March 3th. In Taiwan, the suggested retail prices are NT$12 and NT$137900, respectively, but pre-orders are not currently available in Taiwan.
