With the recent release of the MacBook Pro, Apple introduced the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips, but there is still one chip left in the series: the M4 Ultra. A recent report gives us a little insight into what to expect from the high-end Mac chip.
In his recent Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman mentions in one sentence that the Mac Pro will “probably” receive a chip with a 32-core CPU and an 80-core GPU. Although it doesn’t specifically call it M4 Ultra, the M4 series was just introduced and older Ultra chips have double the CPU and GPU cores of the Max chip. The M4 Max in the MacBook Pro can be configured with a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU – double those specs, and you get numbers that match the specs Gurman says.
Since we know the specs of the M4 Max, we can take this extrapolation of the M4 Ultra a bit further than what Gurman reported. The M4 Max starts with 48GB of RAM, so if an Ultra chip is essentially two Max chips, the M4 Ultra could start with 96GB of RAM. For reference, the current Mac Pro has an M2 Ultra chip with 24 CPU cores and 60 GPU cores and starts with 64GB of RAM.
Gurman also mentions that this will bring “ray tracing to the Mac Pro”, and considering the optimizations and improvements Apple has made since the release of the M2 Pro, the M4 Ultra Mac Pro will, as Gurman says, “l ‘one of the most efficient’. powerful consumer computing systems the market has ever seen.
Gurman previously reported that the Mac Pro wouldn’t arrive until late 2025 or at the earliest, during WWDC 2025 in June. It’s possible we could see the M4 Ultra before that, though, as the high-end Mac Studio uses an Ultra chip, and Gurman has already reported that the Mac Studio could ship in spring 2025 or at WWDC.
Learn more about the upcoming M4 Mac Pro and M4 Mac Studio.
