Apple Mac Studio Is a Pricey Desktop PC for Power Users

pcmag.com:

Apple’s latest Mac is a desktop powerhouse that can be outfitted with the company’s most powerful CPU yet: the newly announced M1 Ultra chip.  

During Tuesday’s Apple event, the company debuted the Mac Studio, a compact PC that measures only 3.7 inches tall and 7.7 inches wide, making it look more like a Mac mini. But despite its small size, the product packs enough computing power to best Apple’s Mac Pro desktop rig from 2019.  

“Mac Studio is a breakthrough in personal computing,” said Apple product line manager Colleen Novielli. “It’s the first computer to put out outrageous performance, extensive connectivity and entirely new capabilities into an unbelievably compact form that lives right on your desk.”

Perhaps the real highlight of the Mac Studio is the silicon inside. Buyers will be able to configure the product with the new M1 Ultra chip, Apple’s latest Arm-based processor for Macs, which promises to beat Xeon processors from Intel. 

The M1 Ultra chip is essentially two M1 Max processors linked together through a die-to-die interconnect called UltraFusion, which allows the CPUs to communicate with each other over 2.5Tb/s of bandwidth. 

“This multi-die architecture is way ahead of anything in the industry,” claimed Apple SVP Johny Srouji. “Thanks to the UltraFusion architecture, it behaves like a single chip architecture.”

The resulting M1 Ultra has 20 CPU cores, a 64-core GPU, and 128GB of unified memory for both RAM and VRAM. “M1 Ultra has 114 billion transistors. That’s seven times more than the M1 chip. It’s the most ever in a personal computer chip,” Srouji added.

Apple also posted some benchmarks for the M1 Ultra, which show the processor providing 90% more performance at the same power level compared to an