Buzz
(Homeland) - M2 Ultra is the most powerful chip Apple has ever created.
After four years, the new Mac Pro has just received its first major upgrade announced by Apple on the WWDC 2023 stage. Notably, this year's most expensive Mac Pro model is priced at up to 320 million VND, using the flagship M2 Ultra chip with 24 CPU cores, 76 GPU cores, and 32 Neural Engine cores.
There are opinions that the M2 Ultra is a 'technological marvel,' the most powerful processor Apple has ever created. So how powerful is this chip that can confidently justify such high pricing for Apple's products?
The Apple M2 Ultra is the successor to the M1 Ultra and is the most powerful chip in the M2 lineup, along with many improvements. The M2 Ultra is essentially two M2 Max chips merged and integrated through UltraFusion technology (allowing both chips to function as a single chip with extremely low latency). UltraFusion uses silicon interposer to merge more than 10,000 signals, providing massive internal processing bandwidth of 2.5TB/s with low latency.
The M2 Ultra features a total of 134 billion transistors, more than 20 billion more than the M1 Ultra. Along with that are 24 CPU cores (16 high-performance cores and 8 new-generation power-efficient cores), 76 GPU cores, and integrated memory up to 192GB. The chip is built on a 5nm process, doubling the memory bandwidth of the M2 Max to 800 GB/s and supporting more memory than 50% compared to the M1 Ultra. The CPU cores are also 20% faster than the M1 Ultra. In terms of overall performance, Apple claims that the M2 Ultra offers over 30% improvement compared to the already powerful M1 Ultra.
The GPU on the M2 Ultra supports a 32-core Neural Engine with processing capability of 31.6 trillion operations per second, 40% faster than the M1 Ultra chip. The new chip also supports a media engine with double the power of the M2 Max to push ProRes to astonishing speeds. Apple claims that using just the 76-core GPU of the M2 Ultra can handle workloads for machine learning that dedicated GPUs couldn't due to memory constraints. With these improvements, the M2 Ultra has elevated the performance of Mac machines to new heights.
The impressive specifications mentioned above demonstrate Apple's latest chip's strength to the extent that the company confidently equips it on all flagship Mac models, from high-end to 'high-end' segments this year. The M2 Ultra not only appears in a highly-priced new generation Mac Studio, but also in the Mac Pro lineup running Apple's first silicon chip. These are all computers with prices reaching thousands of dollars, designed to perform professional-level tasks, so it's not hard to imagine how powerful they are.
