Apple announced the M2 Ultra – the new system chip (SOC), which provides a huge increase in performance for the Mac and completes the M2 family. M2 Ultra is the largest and most capable chip that Apple has ever created, and it makes the new Mac Studio and Mac Pro the most powerful desktop mac ever created.
M2 Ultra is created using the second generation of the 5-nanometer process and uses the unique Apple UltraftSion technology to connect the two M2 Max chips crystals, doubleting performance. The chip consists of 134 billion transistors – this is 20 billion more than in M1 Ultra. Its unified architecture maintains to record 192 GB of memory, which is 50% more than the M1 Ultra, and provides a memory of 800 GB/s memory – twice as much as M2 Max.
M2 Ultra is equipped with a more powerful processor, which is 20% faster than the M1 Ultra, as well as a larger graphic processor that works up to 30% faster, and Neural Engine, which works up to 40% faster. The new media dart is twice as much as M2 MAX capabilities and ensures the acceleration of Prores.
With all these improvements, the M2 Ultra raises the performance of Mac to a completely new level. “M2 Ultra provides amazing performance and opportunities for the most demanding workloads of our professional users, preserving the Apple silicon energy efficiency in the industry,” said Joni Sruji, Apple Senior Vice President for hardware technology.
UltraFusion technology to combine crystals uses a silicon interposezer, which connects them to more than 10,000 signals, providing more than 2.5 TB/s inter -processor bandwidth with a low delay. Such architecture allows the M2 Ultra software to work as one.
24-core CP M2 Ultra consists of 16 + 8 nuclei of the next generation, providing performance 20% higher than that of M1 Ultra. So, on Mac Studio with M2 Ultra, the colorists using Davinci Resolve will be able to process videos 50% faster compared to M1 Ultra, Apple promises.
The graphic processor can have 60 or 76 nuclei of the new generation, which gives an increase in performance up to 30%. Rendering 3D effects using Octane on Mac Studio with M2 Ultra will occur up to three times faster than M1 Ultra, they note in Apple.
M2 Ultra received the capacity of the systemic memory of 800 GB/s, which is much larger than that of PC1. In addition, it can be configured with a massive unified memory of 192 GB. For example, M2 Ultra can provide workload of machine learning in one system that is not able to process even a powerful discrete graphic processor. The 32-core Neural Engine processor provides 31.6 trillion operations per second, which is 40% more than M1 Ultra.
The media-engine twice the capabilities of the M2 Max, it received special hardware coding and decoding H.264, HeVC and Prores. This allows M2 Ultra to play up to 22 streams of 8k Prores 422 video and up to six Pro Display XDR with a resolution of more than 100 million pixels.