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

[Chancha]

And if there are eight LPDDR5 SDRAM chips, the question is who is making the 64GB chip for Apple? Samsung currently advertises their largest LPDDR chip at 32GB, Micron at 16GB.

The M4 Max can use four 32GB LPDDR to get the 128GB total RAM.

Apple could have put 16 32GB LPDDR on the M3 Ultra daughter board (that is home to the SoC) but that means doubling up the memory rows on the board. Sounds tricky to me because the PCB will need to route a great many lines in a small space, but I guess that is why Apple has high-paid EEs.

Doubling density may be the simplest solution, as the footprint of the Studio is already quite filled by the previous Ultra chip. The logic board may still have space for 8 more DRAMs but the copper heatsink structure and the heatpipe may not.

 

[Ramandeepsingh]

It seems steep, but compared to other solutions it's not bad. Like even 4 framework Mainboards will run you 6400$, not including a case, power, cables etc.

 

[ThomasJL]

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.

[sarcasm]
That Thunderbolt 5 port will come in really handy when backing up the latest iPhone 16 with only USB 2, which is 240 times slower than Thunderbolt 5. Tim Cook is a genius who can do no wrong. I love waiting 4 hours to back up an iPhone 16 over USB 2 when it could've taken 1 minute over Thunderbolt 5.
[/sarcasm]

 

[chfilm]

I really wanted the m4 single core performance for Adobe after effects ;(

 

[CWallace]

Apple should be optimizing Comfy UI and similar AI tools for these beasts. With the amount of unified RAM that they have, they would put the 4090 to shame if they helped the developers optimize the code. But they are missing this opportunity and letting much cheaper NVIDIA cards outperform the Maxes and Ultras by a wide margin. It’s sad.

The only AI Apple cares about is their own, I imagine.

 

[rp2011]

Depending on benchmarks, I am considering the Ultra this time around. And I think the Ultra will fare better in terms of sales with this iteration, considering how much and how fast the memory is for those planning on running local LLM's. So, I think I'll just wait for benchmarks before I pull the trigger.

 

[picpicmac]

Doubling density may be the simplest solution

But, then who makes 64GB LPDDR chips? AFAIK, Samsung's largest is 32GB, and Micron's is 24GB.

 

[Chancha]

But, then who makes 64GB LPDDR chips? AFAIK, Samsung's largest is 32GB, and Micron's is 24GB.

Apple getting the first dip? Like the 2TB NAND chips used on the 8TB M4 Pro mini and now the 16TB Studio configs, these are almost not used elsewhere.

 

[skaertus]

Ah the good old days.

Apple’s Four Quadrant product grid

This article highlights Apple’s Four Quadrant product grid revealed by Steve Jobs at the MacWorld Expo in 1998. Many companies like Google and HP are reducing their product complexity to focus on key areas and speed up decision making.

www.casestudyinc.com

View attachment 2488612

And now... convoluted?

 

[Sami13496]

You mean M4 Ultra? The M3 is previous generation.

 

[star-affinity]

Up to just over half a terabyte of RAM is crazy.

It is.
But you used to be able to go to 1.5 TB RAM in the Intel Mac Pro from 2019. This is of course not ”unified memory” which makes the M3 Ultra special – that its memory can be used as video memory for the graphics.

 

[chucker23n1]

It is.
But you used to be able to go to 1.5 TB RAM in the Intel Mac Pro from 2019. This is of course not ”unified memory” which makes the M3 Ultra special – that its memory can be used as video memory for the graphics.

I wouldn't be shocked if the number of people who configured a 1.5 TiB RAM Mac Pro is zero.

(The RAM in the M3 Ultra also runs at more than twice the clock — LPDDR5-6400 vs. DDR4-2933.)

But yeah, in theory, there's workloads that Mac Pro could handily fit in RAM that the Mac Studio won't be able to. Given the current pace (the M1 Ultra maxed out at 128 GiB, the M2 Ultra up to 192), I guess we'll see that resolved around the M6 Ultra.