Apple Explains Why the New Mac Studio Doesn't Have an M4 Ultra Chip

[MacHeritage]

These are not two M3 Max dies together. Thunderbolt 5 wouldn't be there then among other things. These are upgraded basic M3 chip tech with M4 features and a whole new memory system. Technically, a different chip based on the M3. This is a true separate M3 Ultra, completely designed for the Mac Studio. Basic two chips together? Sure but they are not just two M3 Max glued together.

This gives me hope for the Mac Pro and why it is taking longer. It isn't going to be just an M3 Ultra inside and done. Otherwise, they would ship it now unless the chassis is getting upgrades separately or other chip enhancements.

I don't see any of this as a negative and I am guessing the performance results will show that.

 

[m1maverick]

"When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an 'Ultra' tier," he wrote."

Understood. However it was generally thought the M3 would not get the Ultra chip. IMO it's foolish to release an M3 Ultra chip when the rest of the product line, including the Studio Ultras little brother has or is moving to M4.

 

[cnnyy20p]

But I expected M3 to not have Ultra tier because you already skip a generation, Apple. I expected you to be consistent.

 

[Steveo132]

Higher security. The firmware for the boot system is incorporated into an Apple only certified storage system.




You don't have to. TBv5 makes it even easier to buy supplemental storage. "All the storage you need" is substantively different than only storage all your data on one , and only one, storage drive.

Surely they could add the option for internal supplemental storage. I think the decision not to is purely profit driven....folks willing to fork over thousand to avoid plugging an external drive in.

 

[Steveo132]

Are people even doing this stuff on Macs?

Pretty much 100% of the LLM research I've seen has been on x86_64 + Nvidia under Linux. I work at a research university in the CS department and have seen 0.0 interest in buying Macs for LLM purposes.

Local LLM is different to LLM. A lot of folks have various reasons not to have the stuff they talk to their pet AI about leaking to the wider world...so want to run it on their own machine!

A good Mac is ok for middling sized Models, though a little slow. To run middling sized models with Nvidia takes a lot of expensive GPUs, setting up a PC with cards having off it in all directions, and potentially pricey modification in your house to get the Amps you need to the room you want to power it.

I'd love a home threadripper with a bunch of 5090s (or even the true professional GPUs), but its a real pain for residential use.

For a university or business a lot of the negatives become pretty trivial

 

[deconstruct60]

Surely they could add the option for internal supplemental storage.

Not constrained to the desktop footprint and height of the Mac Studio. There is not copious extra room inside a Mac Studio for yet another drive. The new Mac Mini uses even less aluminum that the previous version. One of the objectives here is to shrink the enclosure to be just big enough to enclose the cooling for the desktop deployment.
The SoCs are primarily designed for laptops that have even less empty space for a secondary drive.

The plain Mn up through the Mn Max are all designed primarily for laptops; not desktops. That desktop deployments are just a side-effect to get incrementally more volume in SoC sales.

I think the decision not to is purely profit driven....folks willing to fork over thousand to avoid plugging an external drive in.

You don't have to buy a Apple solution to get slots.

xMac Studio - SONNETTECH

3U enclosure to install and secure one Mac Studio with optional PCIe card expansion in a standard 19-inch rack.

www.sonnettech.com

That doesn't mean "more than a thousand" and/or profits for Apple.

The xMac Studio that doesn't have a PCI-e slot module is well under $1,000. A module that slipped into the empty bracket that only did a drive storage probably wouldn't cost another $400 if folks were actually interested in it in volume.

Facts is that there are lots of Mini's , MBA , iMacs and rest of the line up that need external drives. The Studio is mainly just part of the same , much larger , ecosystem. that is the major market dynamics here.

 

[picpicmac]

Anybody else bothered with the ‘Ultra’ branding? Kind of defeats the purpose and contradicts what the term ‘Max’ actually means

No one said English had to make sense. The lexicon is a mutt.

 

[deconstruct60]

They were wrong

Or there are two different dies that Apple is throwing the "M3 Max" label at. It is a more expensive approach but Apple could have a laptop Max die that does not have a useless UltraFusion that just costs more wafers to get used in volume. Same with the PCI-e backhaul tha only the Mac Pro uses that never sees 'light of day' on a MBP at all. Another chunk of 'dead silicon'.

The M1 Pro and Max were related dies. The Pro largely was just the Max with 'less'. Same process could be used to make a Max with an even smaller increment. Drop PCI-e and UltraFusion to now where with a 'chop' in the design. ( It is not a physical chop of a design . Just a way of dropping off a subset of the design with major changes rippling over the floorplan. Drop off around where the internal network allows connection for amoung other things (power , etc.). )

There could be a M3 Max+ (desktop) die.

In that case the stuff physically examined wouldn't have it. The newer , separate , larger die mask would be a larger die.

MaxTech was speculating at a bigger Ultra die ( the presumption that just create some reticle busting sized die that was about twice as big. ). This could be something that is 1-4% bigger. Another die mask is expensive, but if 90+% of the floorplan is all the same then still pragmatically getting shared R&D costs for most of the two dies.
(for TSMC N3B that didn't make sense. Wrangling product yields on that on a max recticle die would be problematical. )

So possibly more so a version 1.2 die with some fixes and tweaks . If allowing for bigger die than bigger TBv5 controllers could slide in also on the side opposite of the UltraFusion link.

In terms of CPU , GPU , NPU , AV encode it really would be the exact same tech as the M3 Max die. So big picture it is a effectively a M3 Max die. But it would be just different enough to enable 'Fusion' ( and some very narrow I/O upgrades. )

Depending upon how much bigger and if it fits inside of the original M3 Max package they could have flipped the run rate after folks did the die explorations. IHMO, more likely though they didn't start making M3 Max+ until stopped making M3 Max plain/laptop.

 

[deconstruct60]

Or intended use. M4 for portable devices optimized for low power consumption. The Ultra chips and their UltraFusion high-power consumption chips for the desktop.

??? The Ultra is just two Maxes. The power curve isn't going to radically different. There is some power overhead for UltraFusion but it is ins't humongous. That isn't higher than the base Max die itself when fully under load.

There isn't enough demand for Ultra chips to pay for the design cost on every iteration of the Mx line.

To about an equal extent (or more ) there are not enough products for the Ultra. Part of the issue is that Apple Silicon can only be sold to Apple.

The M1/M2 ultra used Max dies that were deployed in MBP 14/16" laptops to help amortize the costs for the Max die development. The wafer costs for N3 (and future wafers for immediate future ) are even more expensive. So putting UltraFusion on millions of laptop dies where that silicon is utterly useless is a waste of space. x16 PCIe that is a 'bridge to nowhere' ... again a waste of space.

Apple used the lpatps to jumpstart the Ultra uption, but there is increasingly little good reason for the laptops to subsidize that forever. Each iteration without the subsidiy is problematical also.

The only 100% Ulta product is the Mac Pro. If has been far over a decade since Apple updated that product on a yearly basis. It doesn't need a yearly update.

It sounds like they reworked the M3 to add the UltraFusion and up the RAM capacity which lots of people were complaining about. They need the memory to handle the AI training.

I looks like Apple is easily their way into a more desktop version of the Max die. The upper end desktop Mac market is much smaller. But still likely doing very high intersection in design with the laptop Max die to amortize costs over a larger user base. It is just the incremental I/O differences that the desktop needs to add value.

 

[pp_amorim]

Technically, Apple silicon chip itself is highly not efficient due to large dies. Bigger dies mean low yield and higher price. But Max series are already as big as RTX high-end GPU and Ultra is several times more expensive than Max due to how they create.

This is the biggest downside of apple silicon as they keep making huge chips which will not do well for Mac. They should probably start developing MCM or chiplet asap.

lmao the M4 is using chiplet.

 

[VisceralRealist]

Anybody else bothered with the ‘Ultra’ branding? Kind of defeats the purpose and contradicts what the term ‘Max’ actually means

Well, "max[imum]" means "greatest" and "ultra" means "beyond". So the Ultra is beyond the greatest Max. It makes sense in that way. 🤔

 

[raindogg]

Seems to me like something went horrible wrong and now they are covering it up. Doesn't really effect me since I'll keep my M2 Max Studio for another 6-7 years.

 

[raccoontail]

I'm guessing the Pro will get an M5 ultra at some point. Apple letting the pro product languish for years without updates is nothing new.. The market for the Mac Pro is just really small now that a $14k studio can be configured with an M3 Ultra, 1/2 TB of RAM and 16TB SSD... The studio's small size even eliminates the need for $400 wheels upgrade to reposition it under your desk.

 

[Lone Deranger]

I ran this through my Apple BS AI-trained filter and this is what came out:

"We ran a cost/benefit analysis and we simply couldn't see a way how to mass produce it and have it meet our yield/cost requirements. We'd have to go below our regular 1000% markup to be able to sell enough units to justify the TMSC fab time. So suck it losers. Here's last year's old M3 tech. We know you'll buy it anyway!"

(I edited out the evil laughter at the end.)

 

[CWallace]

I ran this through my Apple BS AI-trained filter and this is what came out:

"We ran a cost/benefit analysis and we simply couldn't see a way how to mass produce it and have it meet our yield/cost requirements. We'd have to go below our regular 1000% markup to be able to sell enough units to justify the TMSC fab time. So suck it losers. Here's last year's old M3 tech. We know you'll buy it anyway!"

(I edited out the evil laughter at the end.)

They'd actually raise the price to keep their 1000% markup and the forum would howl.

 

[CertFX]

Apple explains why they didn't upgrade to M4Ultra...
MONEY!!!! Why get the plebes to pay for cutting edge technology, when you can get them to pay for the previous years technology! It works for the Mac Studio display! People are paying a premium price for 10 year old panels!!! Slap an aluminum case around it and call it a day!

 

[BNBMS]

lmao the M4 is using chiplet.

It clearly stated that it's SoC, not chiplet.

 

[CWallace]

Apple explains why they didn't upgrade to M4Ultra...
MONEY!!!! Why get the plebes to pay for cutting edge technology, when you can get them to pay for the previous years technology! It works for the Mac Studio display! People are paying a premium price for 10 year old panels!!! Slap an aluminum case around it and call it a day!

Trust me, Tim would happily raises prices to $4999+ for the Mac Studio M4 Ultra and $7999+ for the M4 Ultra Mac Pro rather than sell the M3 Ultra at the same $3999/$6999 as the M2 Ultra models.

That he did not implies what may of us believe is the reason they went with the M3 Ultra - TSMC either does not have the fab capacity for an M4 Ultra or Apple has existing purchasing contracts for the N3B process with TSMC that they need to fulfill - note how in addition to the M3 Ultra, the iPad Air was upgraded to the M3 and the base iPad to the A16 - all fabricated on the N3B process.

 

[macgenius34]

Apple today updated the Mac Studio with mismatched M4 Max and M3 Ultra chip options. Naturally, this has led people to wonder why Apple opted for an M3 Ultra instead of an M4 Ultra chip, and the answer is fairly interesting.

Apple told Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham that not every generation of M-series chips for Macs will include an "Ultra" chip.

"When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an 'Ultra' tier," he wrote.

Perhaps that means we will never get an M4 Ultra chip?

Apple's explanation leads us to wonder which chip the next Mac Pro desktop tower will use. Both the Mac Studio and Mac Pro were updated with the M2 Ultra chip simultaneously in June 2023, and many people in the Apple community felt that the Mac Pro was thereby a bad buy since it costs thousands of dollars more than the Mac Studio despite there being a perceived lack of differentiation between the computers.

When the rumor broke yesterday that the Mac Studio would be updated with M3 Ultra chip, there was hope that Apple would eventually update the Mac Pro with an M4 Ultra chip, for increased differentiation between the computers. Apple's explanation doesn't bode well for that possibility, although it does not explicitly rule it out.

The next Mac Pro could simply end up getting the M3 Ultra chip, and maintain that lack of differentiation over the Mac Studio.

To learn more about the M3 Ultra chip, which is effectively two M3 Max chips combined, read our coverage of Apple's announcement.

Article Link: Apple Explains Why the New Mac Studio Doesn't Have an M4 Ultra Chip

I’ve been a loyal Apple fan for years, but I’m starting to feel like they’ve lost their way. Back in the day, you could walk into an Apple Store and find a whole section dedicated to PowerPC G5 computers. They had three models, low, mid, and high, and you could even buy additional RAM and have it installed right there and then. And let’s not forget about the Studio Displays a 20”, 23”, and 30” option to choose from. You could go in and get a machine and display that fit your budget, knowing that you could always upgrade later.

But now, things are different. Apple’s greed has driven them to make it harder for us to get the computers we want. I ended up with a Mac Studio M2 Max, stock, to avoid shipping delays. It’s a performance upgrade over my old Mac Pro 5,1, but I still have trouble with RAM running low with 32GB. Even after jumping over several different OS versions, I still have apps crashing and Photos is horrible compared to Aperture or even iPhoto. Also, I can’t wake the computer from sleep without my apps and windows jumping all over the place. It’s a constant waste of time have to move everything back to where it was previously!!

It seems like Apple is trying to turn their computers into iPads and combine everything together. They’re focusing on the average user, but if you’re a power user, a small screen iPad or laptop will never replace a tower with two or three displays. It’s just not the same!!!

 

[CWallace]

As someone who has an M2 Mac Studio, an M1 MacBook Pro and an M1 iPad, I find my Macs to be significantly more capable than my iPad...

 

[BNBMS]

This only means Apple needs to change how to produce M series cause it's just terrible inefficient to create high performance chips such as Ultra series and not able to make something for Mac Pro. SoC is just not applicable for huge chips which is too expensive to manufacture with lowest yield.

Apple already have patents for chiplet or MCM a while ago so maybe they'll start creating Apple Silicon with totally new design one day.

 

[CWallace]

TSMC was hoping to have chiplet fabrication available in time for M4, but either they do not or Apple was too far along on M4's design to implement it.

 

[mooooooonb]

“Why is Apple releasing M3 Ultra?! That is SO last year! They’re just in it for the money!”

I’d invite anyone who believe this is a purely profit motives move on Apple’s part to take an Econ 101 class but that may be a bit too advanced in this case.

I’ll try to break it down: Apple tries to sell products to make money. If they sell more products, they make more money. With me so far?

Now, selling an M4 Ultra would make more money because bigger number. This glosses over a multitude of important pieces of information but that doesn’t seem like a big deal. But do you see how if Apple really wanted to juice the customer base they have basically an unlimited number of levers they could pull? Like, for example, just calling it an M4 Ultra?

My first thought was “This is a pretty boneheaded move, these aren’t gonna sell for **** because no one is gonna spend $14k on an M3 when the M4 is significantly more advanced.” Well I did skip Econ 101 but luckily in the group home for the mentally challenged where I did my K-12 they at least taught us that the goal in a business is generally not to release expensive products no one will buy. You can actually lose money if you’re not careful!

Point number 2: y’all think Google and Samsung are operating purely to sustain orphanages for minority refugees or something? Get real. Why don’t you go complain to about Dow Chemical poisoning the water supply for 💰, or oil and gas companies convincing an alarming number of people that ongoing widespread environmental destruction is a hoax, so nothing impinges on their profits?

All companies are full of ****. But Apple is probably the least full of **** company out there at that scale. It’s your right to complain about anything you want.

But wake up and take a look at the world. There could be things going on that are more worthy of your attention than “I frankly do not think these computers are a good value for the cost, no sir too costly for my tastes!”.

 

[Sophytaylor6@]

M3 Ultra supports high-end models and is known for its superior performance. It offers advanced graphics and is much faster than the older chips. So choosing it is not a bad decision.

 

[pksv]

“Why is Apple releasing M3 Ultra?! That is SO last year! They’re just in it for the money!”

I’d invite anyone who believe this is a purely profit motives move on Apple’s part to take an Econ 101 class but that may be a bit too advanced in this case.

I’ll try to break it down: Apple tries to sell products to make money. If they sell more products, they make more money. With me so far?

Now, selling an M4 Ultra would make more money because bigger number. This glosses over a multitude of important pieces of information but that doesn’t seem like a big deal. But do you see how if Apple really wanted to juice the customer base they have basically an unlimited number of levers they could pull? Like, for example, just calling it an M4 Ultra?

My first thought was “This is a pretty boneheaded move, these aren’t gonna sell for **** because no one is gonna spend $14k on an M3 when the M4 is significantly more advanced.” Well I did skip Econ 101 but luckily in the group home for the mentally challenged where I did my K-12 they at least taught us that the goal in a business is generally not to release expensive products no one will buy. You can actually lose money if you’re not careful!

Point number 2: y’all think Google and Samsung are operating purely to sustain orphanages for minority refugees or something? Get real. Why don’t you go complain to about Dow Chemical poisoning the water supply for 💰, or oil and gas companies convincing an alarming number of people that ongoing widespread environmental destruction is a hoax, so nothing impinges on their profits?

All companies are full of ****. But Apple is probably the least full of **** company out there at that scale. It’s your right to complain about anything you want.

But wake up and take a look at the world. There could be things going on that are more worthy of your attention than “I frankly do not think these computers are a good value for the cost, no sir too costly for my tastes!”.

It doesn't sound as smart and insightful as you think it sounds.