Apple Introduces M3 Ultra Chip With Impressive Performance, Up to 512GB of RAM, and More

[MacRumors]

Apple today unveiled the M3 Ultra chip, its fastest Mac chip ever released. It is available in the new Mac Studio that was also announced today.

Apple says the M3 Ultra chip is essentially two M3 Max chips fused together with its "UltraFusion" technology, so the chip's specs are all doubled compared to the M3 Max. There was speculation last year about the M3 Max chip lacking UltraFusion technology, but Apple's announcement today has proven that rumor was false.

Apple:

Apple's custom-built UltraFusion packaging technology uses an embedded silicon interposer that connects two M3 Max dies across more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth, and making M3 Ultra appear as a single chip to software.

The M3 Ultra chip features up to a 32-core CPU, with 24 performance cores and eight efficiency cores. Apple says the M3 Ultra chip is up to 1.5x faster than the M2 Ultra chip, and up to 1.8x faster than the M1 Ultra chip.

In addition, the M3 Ultra chip can be configured with up to an 80-core GPU. Apple says the M3 Ultra chip offers up to 2x faster graphics performance than the M2 Ultra, and up to 2.6x faster graphics than the M1 Ultra chip.

The chip has a 32-core Neural Engine, and it supports up to 512GB of unified RAM, with up to 819 GB/s memory bandwidth.

Like the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips, the M3 Ultra chip supports Thunderbolt 5 for up to 120 GB/s data transfer speeds on Macs with Thunderbolt 5 ports.

Apple says the M3 Ultra chip has industry-leading power efficiency in its class.

Article Link: Apple Introduces M3 Ultra Chip With Impressive Performance, Up to 512GB of RAM, and More

 

[MayaUser]

why is called M3 Ultra since has double almost everything besides bandwidth ?

 

[johnalan]

I'm not a hardware engineer, but it feels a little bizarre/confusing with the current line up...

M4 Max in latest MBP and Studio, but the M3 Ultra is the best in the Studio? - the Mac Pro still on M2 Ultra...

 

[abatabia]

Just when you thought they were done with M3….

 

[MayaUser]

I'm not a hardware engineer, but it feels a little bizarre/confusing with the current line up...

M4 Max in latest MBP and Studio, but the M3 Ultra is the best in the Studio? - the Mac Pro still on M2 Ultra...

yes, that Mac Pro has to be updated as soon as WWDC, because its ridiculous to have the M3 ultra in an cheaper device

 

[AusMness]

It also goes up to 16TB of storage now instead of 8
How does one even utilize all that space 😅

 

[MayaUser]

Now, apple has to update the studio displays with TB 5 as well

 

[PsykX]

And the Mac Pro got no love.
Or do they want to keep the M4 Ultra for the Mac Pro ?
Confusing to say the least.

I'm also surprised they didn't say it's the fastest CPU on Earth. They just said "world's fastest CPU core", I guess they mean single-core result ?

 

[PsykX]

It also goes up to 16TB of storage now instead of 8
How does one even utilize all that space 😅

Video Editing and you fill that 16 TB up pretty quickly. But I don't see anything else.

 

[neuropsychguy]

It also goes up to 16TB of storage now instead of 8
How does one even utilize all that space 😅

4k and 8k video files. Research data (I could easily fill 16TB with my data).

 

[chfilm]

It is ridiculous! They will sell us the Mac Pro with m4 ultra for 2000$ extra. I don't WANT a massive tower again, after seeling the 2019 mac pro and getting rid of all the video cards, raid cards etc. I can't believe they did this!

 

[MRSugarD]

Didn‘t Gurman claim/guess that the M3 Ultra was a unique chip? It is simply two M3 Max connected via UltraFusion. Nothing special or new there.

 

[cicalinarrot]

I am confusion

 

[Quash]

They probably wanted to make this chip for their data-centers.
Might as well sell some in an expensive mac studio.

Will be interesting to see if it's 2 fused max chips or a dedicated ultra chip.
Probably the latter since it has TB5 and 4x the m3 max memory capacity.

 

[Simon R.]

Video Editing and you fill that 16 TB up pretty quickly. But I don't see anything else.

Music production for one. But I would not trust a single, internal soldered SSD for all my samples/projects. And video editors wouldn't want that either. Unfortunately we need a lot of external devices to go with the Studio.

 

[Ferrandix]

They are screwing up with product segmentation and naming. Just like the iPad line up. This is confusing and counter intuitive. If Apple (Apple!) is making complicated product line ups with confusing understanding, we are already doomed.

 

[Big_D]

It also goes up to 16TB of storage now instead of 8
How does one even utilize all that space 😅

Quite easily, depending on what you are doing. If you are working on large video projects or 3D CAD work, you can very quickly run out of space.

Start doing heavy data analysis, data warehousing, document management etc. and you can very quickly run into multiple TB of data.

 

[mozumder]

Dream AI machine.

Just need a version with 2TB Memory to fit the full DeepSeek-R1 model.

Every corporation will use these for their internal AI servers. (companies hate to use external AI services due to data leakage)

 

[JaredJenkinsDesign]

Curious if this M3 Ultra chip will be supported longer than the other M3 generation chips, I mean you would think that would be the case. Also wondering how the single-core CPU performance is compared to the M4 generation. Definitely a bit confusing...

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

My take is that the Studio will continue to be an entirely ‘Max’ product; that is one Max chip or two interconnected (M-Ultra).

The Mac Pro could well have its own solution, a monolithic die that is unique to the Pro’s architecture and what it can offer in the form of expandability.

But we don’t know so difficult to speculate.

 

[transpo1]

It also goes up to 16TB of storage now instead of 8
How does one even utilize all that space 😅

Video. Lots of it.

 

[Mazda 3s]

Where are all the people that were 💩'n on Mark Gurman yesterday?

 

[transpo1]

My take is that the Studio will continue to be an entirely ‘Max’ product; that is one Max chip or two interconnected (M-Ultra).

The Mac Pro could well have its own solution, a monolithic die that is unique to the Pro’s architecture and what it can offer in the form of expandability.

But we don’t know so difficult to speculate.

They must be saving the M4 Ultra for the Mac Pro to differentiate it. Product segmentation for the win. 🏆

 

[aibloop]

I VERY recently bought a 16inch Macbook pro Max. I wanted to buy a stationary, but this didnt exist. SOOOO.

For the same price as my Macbook I can get the M3 Ultra and 96GB ram VS 64gb ram on the macbook.

What I need to know is the performance... Anything out yet?

 

[dricci]

There was a time when variations of the G3 and G4 and then G4 and G5 coexisted in Apple's lineup.