Apple has unveiled the M3 Ultra, a powerful processor featuring a combination of two M3 Max chips, enhancing core counts to deliver superior performance. This upgrade introduces 32 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, and hardware-accelerated ray-tracing capabilities, while also supporting up to 512GB of RAM and Thunderbolt 5. The M3 Ultra clarifies previous speculation regarding Apple's silicon strategy, suggesting the company is fine-tuning its approach based on market needs rather than regularly introducing Ultra versions with every generation of chips.
And while an "M4 Ultra" has appeared in some rumors about the next-gen Mac Studio update, that processor's core counts match up with what Apple announced as the M3 Ultra today.
Apple has also added a couple of extras, getting the M3 Ultra certified for 120Gbps Thunderbolt 5... and supporting up to 512GB of RAM.
The existence of the M3 Ultra puts to rest some lightly sourced speculation from last year, suggesting that the M3 Max was shipping without the silicon used to fuse two Max chips together into a single Ultra chip.
Apple likely has a better sense of how the Max-versus-Ultra sales break down. It may simply be the case that the sales of the high-end Mac Studio and Mac Pro can't justify the cost and effort needed to design and manufacture a new Ultra chip.
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