Apple on Aug. 25 introduced the M5 Ultra and M6 chips for its new Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops. Mac mini preorders start at US$899, and shipments begin after September 22.

Apple said the M5 Ultra combines two dual-die M5 Max chips into what it called its first quad-die chip.

The processor has up to a 36-core central processing unit (CPU), an 80-core graphics processing unit (GPU), and 1.2 TB/s of unified memory bandwidth.

Earlier Ultra chips joined two dies through UltraFusion.

The M6 has a 12-core CPU, and Apple said it can deliver nearly 30% more peak GPU compute for AI than the M5.

Apple’s announcement highlighted GPU compute and memory bandwidth for AI workloads rather than the neural processing unit (NPU) TOPS metric used in Windows AI PCs.

Microsoft says Copilot+ devices need at least 40 TOPS, while Qualcomm promotes 45 TOPS.

The launch adds to Apple’s push to run more AI workloads locally on Macs after Siri’s overhaul was delayed multiple times and Apple turned to Google’s Gemini for some cloud-based Siri features.

🔗 Source: TechCrunch

Recent Apple developments