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Apple M2 Ultra: Everything You Need to Know
Apple has always been at the forefront of innovation in the technology industry. Its in-house designed silicon, like the M1 Ultra, has taken the tech world by storm. However, Apple has yet again raised the bar by releasing the biggest design improvements with the M2 Ultra. At the WWDC 2023 event, the California-based tech giant announced its latest chipset, the Apple M2 Ultra. A die significantly larger than the M1 Ultra, the M2 Ultra incorporates two M2 Max chips, using Apple’s UltraFusion technology. The Apple M2 Ultra processor is a powerful machine that goes beyond expectations, making it worthwhile to delve deeper into its technical specifications and features. In this article, we will discuss the Apple M2 Ultra’s specifications and performance gains in CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine.
Apple M2 Ultra Specs
At first glance, the Apple M2 Ultra seems to be a significant improvement over the M1 Ultra. Let’s take a look at its specifications:
| Fabrication Process | TSMC 2nd-gen 5nm |
| Transistors | 134 Billion |
| CPU Cores | 24 (16 High-performance + 8 High-efficiency) |
| GPU Cores | 60 or 76 cores |
| Neural Engine | 32 cores; 31.6 TOPS |
| Unified Memory (RAM) | Up to 192GB |
| Memory Bandwidth | 800GBps |
Apple M2 Ultra: CPU
The M2 Ultra chipset is home to a significant upgrade in CPU performance over the already powerful M1 Ultra. With a staggering 134 billion transistors and 24 CPU cores, we knew the Apple M2 Ultra meant business.
The larger die on the M2 Ultra is TSMC’s 2nd-gen 5nm process technology. Compared to the M1 Ultra with 114 billion transistors, Apple has made significant improvements. The M2 Ultra chipset features two infused M2 Max chips using the UltraFusion technology. The UltraFusion technology uses a silicon interposer, which connects the two dies, allowing the chip to offer double the performance of an M2 Max chip with 16 high-performance and eight high-efficiency cores.
According to Apple, the M2 Ultra chipset offers 20% faster CPU performance across the board. Programs like DaVinci Resolve also see a 50% improvement in video processing.
Apple M2 Ultra: GPU
The Apple M2 Ultra takes a step further in upgrading the GPU, offering a base variant with 60 GPU cores and another variant with 76 GPU cores. The larger GPU on the M2 Ultra chipset is over 30% more powerful than that of M1 Ultra. The display engine can power up to six Pro Display XDRs, driving over 100 million pixels with the media engine playing 22 streams of 8K ProRes videos simultaneously.
Even more impressive, the chipset has hardware-accelerated encoders and decoders for H.264, HEVC, and ProRes media formats, making the M2 Ultra a professional’s dream come true.
Apple M2 Ultra: Unified Memory
Apple M2 Ultra features up to 192GB of unified memory (RAM) with a low latency memory bandwidth of 800GBps. Three configurations of RAM include 64GB, 128GB, and 192GB. The memory bandwidth of M2 Ultra chipset is double of M2 Max, proving to be far greater than what most PC systems can offer.
Due to Apple’s unique unified memory architecture, accessing shared memory across the CPU, CPU, and Neural Engine is incredibly efficient in terms of power usage and latency.
Apple M2 Ultra: Neural Engine
The Apple M2 Ultra boasts a massive 31.6 TOPS, bringing with it a unique 32-core Neural Engine for handling machine learning workloads locally. Apple has described it as perfect for training massive machine learning workloads in a single system.
The 32-core Neural Engine on the Apple M2 Ultra chipset is unrivaled, delivering up to 3 times faster performance speed in comparison to the M1 Ultra. The high-performance and low-latency Unified Memory architecture of the M2 Ultra chipset are crucial components for the Neural Engine’s performance improvement.
Apple has compared the Neural Engine to a PC System with NVIDIA RTX A6000 graphics with 48GB GDDR6 memory, and the Neural Engine with the Unified memory architecture beat the discrete GPU easily, showcasing the prowess of the Apple M2 Ultra.
Conclusion
The Apple M2 Ultra
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