Apple today announced updated Mac Studio models powered by its new M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, with the Ultra variant marking the company’s most powerful processor to date.
The machines go up for pre-order immediately and ship September 22, though the top configuration with 512GB of unified memory won’t arrive until late October.
What the M5 Ultra delivers
The M5 Ultra combines the power of two M5 Max chips into one mega-processor using Apple’s custom UltraFusion technology.
The chip packs up to a 36-core CPU, with 12 performance cores and 24 efficiency cores. That translates to up to 1.25x faster single-core performance and 1.3x faster multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra in the previous Mac Studio.
On the graphics side, the M5 Ultra offers up to 80 GPU cores and delivers up to 40% faster graphics performance than the M3 Ultra.
The gains come in part from second-generation Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and third-generation ray tracing.
Apple also says AI-specific GPU compute is up to 4.5x faster than the M3 Ultra and more than 6x faster than the M1 Ultra, driven by Neural Accelerator hardware built into each GPU core. A 32-core Neural Engine handles on-device AI workloads.
The chip’s Media Engine adds hardware support for H.264, HEVC, four ProRes encode and decode engines, and hardware-accelerated AV1 decode, making it well suited for professional video work at scale.
Memory and connectivity upgrades
The M5 Ultra configuration supports up to 512GB of unified memory with up to 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, a 50% increase over the M3 Ultra.
Apple positions that headroom as practical for running large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on device without relying on cloud processing.
Multiple Mac Studio systems can also be clustered via Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA to create a shared memory pool. Apple says four systems linked together deliver up to 3x faster AI inference than a single machine.
Both new Mac Studio models gain Thunderbolt 5 ports with up to 120Gb/s bandwidth, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 6 via Apple’s N1 networking chip.
Storage relies on a new PCIe Gen 6 SSD architecture Apple says is up to twice as fast as before. The machine can also drive up to eight displays simultaneously and supports genlock over USB-C, a feature aimed at broadcast and video production workflows.
M5 Max option and availability
Buyers who don’t need the Ultra’s headroom can configure the new Mac Studio with an M5 Max, which offers an 18-core CPU, up to 40 GPU cores, up to 128GB of unified memory, and up to 8TB of storage. Apple claims the M5 Max delivers up to 3.9x faster AI performance than its predecessor.
Most configurations ship September 22. The 512GB unified memory model with M5 Ultra launches in late October, with pricing for that configuration expected to exceed $10,000.
