At the first celebration event of 2022 that Apple did in March, we saw new iPhone SEs, new finishes on the iPhone 13, the arrival of the 5th generation iPad Air, as well as the new equipment Mac Studio and Studio Display.
However, the higher performance of the new Apple Silicon chips seems to be a determining factor when ranking the next generations of equipment, as we have seen with the arrival of the M1 Ultra which joins the previous M1 Pro and M1 Max.
What new features does the M1 Ultra offer compared to the M1 Pro and M1 Max?
As Apple explained at its event, thanks to the new UltraFusion architecture, the company manages to integrate two M1 Max chips into an SoC package in a way that reaches new levels of performance and capabilities. It was called the M1 Ultra.
In this way, the new M1 Ultra chip debuts in a new team launched by Apple, which is none other than the Apple Mac Studio, a team very oriented towards creative professionals who demand power, keeping intact performance per watt.
Inside, it packs a total of 114 billion transistors and can be configured with up to 128 GB of high-bandwidth unified memory, providing a total of 20 CPU cores and up to 64 GPU cores.
To get an idea of the increase in performance, which can sometimes reach 60% in certain tasks compared to the predecessor, we must take into account the data of the M1 Max chip, which has 10 CPU cores and 32 GPU cores.
What is the UltraFusion Architecture?
We’ve already mentioned that to create the M1 Ultra, Apple combines two M1 Max chips with UltraFusion, the custom-designed packaging architecture.
The most common way to increase CPU performance is to connect two chips through a motherboard using a dual socket, which usually leads to more serious latency issues, as well as reduced bandwidth. bandwidth and increased power consumption.
With UltraFusion, Apple uses a middleman that connects chips to more than 10,000 signals, providing a whopping 2.5 TB/s bandwidth, more than four times the multi-chip connection technology used by other architectures.
How do apps and software behave?
If the M1 Ultra stands out for anything, it’s because it shows you the operating system as if it were a single chip, so the software recognizes it as such, developers n therefore do not have to rewrite the code to benefit from the performances.
Development technologies like Metal let you take full advantage of the new chip, and Core ML optimizations use the new 32-core neural engine to run machine learning models even faster.
Another big plus is that users have access to the entire collection of Mac apps, including iPhone and iPad apps that can already run on Mac and Universal apps, which take full advantage of the M1 chip family.
Applications that have not yet been upgraded to Universal can still work with the help of Apple’s Rosetta 2.
