Apple unveils M1 Ultra, says 'there’s never been anything like it'

Apple has introduced M1 Ultra, a system-on-chip (SoC) that it says is the most powerful M1 chip it has ever made.

Unveiled last night during Apple's March 2022 launch event, the M1 Ultra is essentially two M1 Max chips paired together, using interconnection technology dubbed UltraFusion.

The usual way to scale performance is to connect two chips through a motherboard, which typically brings significant trade-offs, including increased latency, reduced bandwidth, and increased power consumption. 

Instead, UltraFusion uses a silicon interposer that connects the chips across more than 10 000 signals, providing a massive 2.5TBps of low latency, inter-processor bandwidth, more than four times the bandwidth of the other multi-chip interconnect technology.

“M1 Ultra is another game-changer for Apple silicon that once again will shock the PC industry. "'

Johny Srouji, senior VP of Hardware Technologies, Apple.

This also allows the M1 Ultra to behave and be recognised by software as one chip, so developers don’t need to rewrite code. Apple says there’s never been anything like it.

The new SoC consists of 114 billion transistors, the most ever seen in a personal computer chip. M1 Ultra can be configured with up to 128GB of high-bandwidth, low-latency unified memory that can be accessed by the 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core neural engine.

According to Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior VP of Hardware Technologies, this will provide top performance for developers compiling code, artists working in huge 3D environments that were previously impossible to render, and video professionals who can now transcode video to ProRes up to 5.6x faster.

He said M1 Ultra, its powerful CPU, massive GPU, incredible Neural Engine, ProRes hardware acceleration, and massive amount of unified memory, completes the M1 family as the world’s most powerful and capable chip for a personal computer.

Srouji said: “M1 Ultra is another game-changer for Apple silicon that once again will shock the PC industry. By connecting two M1 Max die with our UltraFusion packaging architecture, we’re able to scale Apple silicon to unprecedented new heights.”