Apple M2 Ultra chip announced at WWDC 2023 as upgrade to Mac Studio and Mac Pro
Apple just announced the new Apple M2 Ultra chip at WWDC 2023, filling out its M2 lineup even further with a powerful new workstation chip capable of handling some of the most demanding content creation workloads.
“M2 Ultra delivers astonishing performance and capabilities for our pro users’ most demanding workflows, while maintaining Apple silicon’s industry-leading power efficiency,” Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, said in a statement emailed to TechRadar. “With huge performance gains in the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, combined with massive memory bandwidth in a single SoC, M2 Ultra is the world’s most powerful chip ever created for a personal computer.”
The new SoC's CPU should be 20% faster than the M1 Ultra, with a 30% faster GPU, and a 40% faster neural engine. It also increases the amount of maximum unified memory to 192GB, and in the Mac Studio, you can get the latest HDMI upgrade so you can get 8K video output. You can also support six Pro Display XDR monitors, with 22 4K stream inputs.
You can get the new M2 Ultra in the Mac Studio or the Mac Pro, with the latter offering PCIe expansion slots, which is a major boon for industrial users who need high-end cards for storage, encoding, and much more.
You will be able to order the new Mac Studio and Mac Pro with Apple M2 Ultra chip starting today, with deliveries coming next week
Apple cuts its final tie to Intel with the M2 Ultra
With the introduction of the Apple M2 Ultra, Apple has finally cut its remaining ties to Intel, which still supplied Intel Xeon processors for the Mac Pro. With the move to Apple silicon now complete, Apple has full control over its ecosystem in a way it hasn't in more than a decade.
Intel has been been rocked a bit on both sides, with Apple taking its popular laptops and desktops in-house, and AMD offering very competitive Ryzen processors for desktops (and increasingly laptops).
The final move from Intel Xeon to M2 Ultra though does come with some degree of risk. A lot of industries aren't as tied specifically to Apple hardware as they might have been in years past. With the increasing power of Nvidia's GPUs and AMD Threadripper, Apple has a lot more competition than it did in the professional/industrial space.
How many people make the jump to M2 Ultra remains to be seen, especially with the Mac Pro, but there is undoubtedly a lot of excited Apple fans out there.
