Apple claims its new M1 Ultra SoC beats the GeForce RTX 3090

pcgamesn.com:

During its recent Apple Event on March 8, the company announced a new flagship SoC which will power its upcoming Mac Studio devices, the M1 Ultra. Now, similar to how it did when it launched its previous flagship chip, Apple is boldly claiming that its new chip beats Nvidia’s best graphics card, the GeForce RTX 3090.

By interconnecting two of its ARM-based M1 Max chips, Apple has created what it describes as the “world’s most powerful and capable chip for a personal computer.” Its specs certainly suggest it’ll have class-leading performance, with 20 CPU cores, 64 GPU cores, 128GB of unified memory, and up to 2.5TB/s of bandwidth.

In tests conducted by Apple, it found that the M1 Ultra came out slightly ahead of the RTX 3090 in ‘relative performance’, all with 200W less power. While this sounds impressive, the company is annoyingly short on specifics in terms of metrics and programs used, describing the assortment of applications as “select industry‑standard benchmarks.”

Since you can’t buy the M1 Max separately from the Mac Studio, it won’t be replacing the best gaming CPUs found in gaming PCs today. However, it should pique the interest of creatives that primarily use discrete graphics cards for workloads such as video editing and 3D modelling.

Naturally, this level of performance doesn’t come cheap, with the Mac Studio starting at $1,999 USD / £1,999 GBP. So, if you do plan to grab Apple’s latest and greatest SoC, make sure you can stomach the cost.