Apple's new M1 Ultra chip isn't a PC killer, it's just a sign of great things to come
Nvidia, AMD, and Intel have all been in something of a race to multi-die GPUs. The theory is if you take one powerful chip and glue it seamlessly to another, you'll end up with something twice as good. Simple, right? Well, it's not quite that easy, and while AMD has managed to make this concept work for its high-end supercomputer compute MI200 accelerator, no one else has had anything more to share as of yet.
M1 Ultra is another game-changer for Apple silicon that once again will shock the PC industry.
Well, until Apple just rolled in with its new M1 Ultra System-on-Chip (SoC).
Combining two M1 Max SoCs, which launched late last year, the new Apple M1 Ultra brings together their many CPU and GPU cores, into a single package. That makes for a 20-core Arm-based CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine under one roof. That makes for a chip with 114 billion transistors in total. That can then be configured with up to 128GB memory on the side.
Just for a point of reference, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 features 28.3 billion transistors in total. Granted, the Apple M1 Ultra is CPU, GPU, and I/O all in one package, and then doubled through an interconnect, but effectively Apple has thrown a whole lot of transistors at the compute problem to make it go away.
The key to it the Ultra chip is what Apple calls «UltraFusion»; its new packaging architecture. It's effectively a 10,000 signal strong bond along the edge of each of the chips, which is put there during the packaging process. This allows for high-speed communication between the two connected chips of up to 2.5TB/s. Which is a big number by any understanding.
The interconnect itself is not an entirely new concept, and Intel and AMD have their own high-bandwidth
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