Apple introduced two new chips this week. The first is called M6. The second is called M5 Ultra.
M6 will power the new Mac mini. M5 Ultra will power the new Mac Studio.
Apple says both chips bring a large jump in performance. The company also says they improve how well Macs handle AI tasks.
M6 is Apple's first chip built using a 2 nanometer manufacturing process. This process packs more transistors into a smaller space.
M6 Chip Specs and Features
M6 has a 12-core CPU. That includes 2 super cores, 4 performance cores, and 6 efficiency cores.
Apple says this setup gives M6 the fastest single-threaded performance of any of its chips so far. It also claims faster multithreaded performance than the previous M5 chip.
The chip also has a 12-core GPU. Each core includes a Neural Accelerator built to speed up AI work.
Apple says this raises peak GPU compute for AI by close to 30 percent compared to M5.
M6 includes a Dual 16-core Neural Engine. Apple says this doubles peak compute compared to earlier chips.
The chip supports up to 32GB of unified memory. It also offers memory bandwidth of up to 170GB per second.
Apple says these upgrades help M6 run large language models directly on the device rather than through the cloud.
M5 Ultra Brings Desktop-Class Power
M5 Ultra is built differently. It uses a new design called UltraFusion to join four dies into one chip.
Apple says this is the first time it has used a quad-die setup in a Mac chip.
The chip has up to 36 CPU cores. It also has up to 80 GPU cores, each with its own Neural Accelerator.
Apple says M5 Ultra offers up to 4.5 times the peak AI compute of the older M3 Ultra chip.
M5 Ultra supports up to 512GB of unified memory. Its memory bandwidth reaches 1.2TB per second, which Apple says is 50 percent higher than M3 Ultra.
Apple says this level of memory lets users run AI models with hundreds of billions of parameters directly on the Mac.
The chip also includes a 32-core Neural Engine and an updated Media Engine for video editing.
Apple built the new chips to work with its developer tools, including Core ML, Metal, and Xcode. These tools let developers run and adjust AI models on the device itself.
Sri Santhanam, Apple's vice president of Silicon Engineering Group, said M6 and M5 Ultra represent the next step in Apple's chip design work. He said the chips combine more cores, added memory bandwidth, and stronger AI capability.
The M6 chip ships in the new Mac mini. The M5 Ultra chip ships in the new Mac Studio, which Apple lists as its most powerful desktop system to date.
